Merrington glanced carelessly at the little silver pencil-case, and after asking the pawnbroker a few questions he permitted him to depart. Then he touched his bell and sent for Detective Caldew. Half an hour later Caldew emerged from his chief's room in possession of the pawnbroker's story, with the addition of as much authoritative counsel as the mind of Merrington could suggest for its investigation. Caldew did not relish the task of following up the slender clue. He had not been impressed by the relation of Mr. Hobbs' supposed recognition of Nepcote, although as a detective he was aware that unlikely statements were sometimes followed by important results. But the element of luck entered largely into the elucidation of chance testimony. There were some men in Scotland Yard who could turn a seeming fairy tale into a startling fact, but there were others who failed when the probabilities were stronger. Caldew accounted himself one of these unlucky ones. But luck was with him that day. At least, it seemed so to him that evening, as he returned to Holborn after a long and trying afternoon spent in the squalid streets and slums of St Pancras and Islington. The goddess of Chance, bestowing her favours with true feminine caprice, had taken it into her wanton head, at the last moment, to accomplish for him the seemingly impossible feat of tracing the pawnbroker's marked shilling, through various dirty hands, to the pocket of the man who had pawned the pencil-case. Whether she would grant him the last favour of all, by enabling him to prove whether this man and Nepcote were identical, was a point Caldew intended to put to the proof that night. Caldew was in high good humour with himself at such a successful day's work, and he alighted from the tram with the intention of passing a couple of hours pleasantly by treating himself to a little dinner in town before returning to Islington to complete his investigations. He wandered along from New Oxford Street to Charing Cross by way of Soho, scanning the restaurant menus as he passed with the indecisive air of a poor man unused to the privilege of paying high rates for bad food in strange surroundings. The foreign smells and greasy messes of Old Compton Street repelled his English appetite, and he did not care to mingle with the herds of suburban dwellers who were celebrating the fact that they were alive by making uncouth merriment over three-and-sixpenny tables d'hotes and crude Burgundy and Chianti in the cheap glitter of Wardour Street. As a disciplined husband and father, Caldew's purse did not permit of his going further West for his refection, so when he reached Charing Cross he turned his face in the direction of Fleet Street. He had almost made up his mind in favour of a small English eating-house half-way down the Strand, when he encountered Colwyn.