She ran her hand round the silken lining of the case and suddenly her fingers stopped. She felt a thin, oblong package under the silk. Reaching out, she took Coldwell’s scissors from his desk and cut through the silk. Inserting her fingers, she drew forth an envelope. It was closed and bore no inscription. She tore off the end and drew out an oblong document. It was a marriage certificate, performed apparently by the Reverend H. Hermitz, of Elfield, Connecticut. “Good heavens!” said the startled Coldwell, reading over her shoulder. For a moment the words swam before the eyes of the girl, and then out of the blur they appeared with staggering clearness. It was a document certifying that Peter James Dawlish had been joined in holy matrimony with Jane Winifred Hood--and Hood was Lady Raytham’s maiden name! She read it again, then put the document into the inspector’s hands. “Then they were married!” she said evenly. “That was the thing I wasn’t sure about.” CHAPTER XII. PETER’S MOTHER Peter found it very difficult to concentrate his mind upon his work, and although his task was purely mechanical he stopped from time to time and allowed his thoughts to wander. Inevitably they wandered toward that gray building on the Thames Embankment, and a room somewhere in its dark interior where a girl was sitting. He could see her face very clearly. He sighed and took up his pen again, and cursed himself for the folly of dreams. Far better for him, he thought, that, if he could not concentrate upon his work, he let his mind go roving westward to the bleak moor and those ugly prison buildings that are set in a fold of it; to the carved sneer on the stone arch under which he had walked heavy-footed toward the golden-bearded warder who stood by the iron gates and counted the prisoners in and out; to the long, smelly “ward,” and the vaultlike cells with their gayly coloured blankets; to the stretch of bog land from which the convict workers returned soaked to the skin to their lukewarm dinners; to the barnlike laundry, the silent punishment cells, and the cracked asphalt where the prisoners walked in a ring on Sunday mornings. An ugly memory, but at least one of accomplishment, and substantially past. It was much better than letting your fancies go straying toward the straight figure of a girl with violet eyes and red lips that curved everlastingly in laughter. He had reached the S’s in the list, the Simpsons and Sims and Sinclairs. It was ill-paid work, his employer being a bookmaker of dubious probity; but so far as he was concerned, he had been paid something in advance, and he had been promised another job to follow.