l talked together for a few
minutes, and then walked slowly arm in arm out of the station towards
the village. Dawson picked up his police assistant and followed. He
gave no explanation of the reasons for his shadowing of the man
Maynard, for he was just beginning to feel uneasy. Slowly the party of
four threaded through the pretty little place, bright under the
pleasant autumn twilight. Maynard and the girl were in front, Dawson
and his policeman followed some fifty yards behind. In a side street,
at the door of a small cottage--one of a humble row--the pair of
mourners stopped, opened the iron gate, and entered. Dawson waited,
watching. He could see through the windows into a little parlour where
some half a dozen people, all in deep black, were gathered. Presently,
as if they had waited only for the arrival of Maynard--which indeed
was the fact--the heavy steps of men clumping down wooden stairs
resounded from the open door, and there emerged into the street a
coffin borne upon the shoulders of six bearers. The moment that the
coffin appeared Dawson realised his blunder. Maynard had really lost
his mother, and, like a dutiful son, had come all the way from the
Three Towns to bury her! Off flew Dawson's hat, and he nudged the
policeman hard in the ribs. "Take off your helmet, you chump," he
growled savagely. "Don't you see that it's a funeral." The man, rather
dazed--he had been plucked away from Liverpool Street at a moment's
notice and sent upon what he thought was police service--did what he
was told. The group of mourners formed behind the coffin, which was
carried to the cemetery not far off. Still following, with their heads
bowed, Dawson and the bewildered policeman attended the funeral, heard
the beautiful service read, and the last offices completed. Then they
turned away and made for the railway station.

"Why, sir," asked the policeman, looking sideways rather fearfully at
his superior officer's stern face--"why, sir, did we come to this
place?"

"Why? Haven't you seen?" snapped Dawson. "To attend a funeral, of
course."

* * * * *

I have never met that policeman. To have conversed with him and to
have sought to chop a way through the tangled recesses of his mind
would have gratified me hugely. For, if police constables think at
all, in what a bewildered whirl of confused speculation must his poor
brain have been occupied during the return journey to London! Dawson
tosse