rgh staring after him.

CHAPTER X

THE WOMAN AT ASHFORD

Tarling went back to his lodgings that afternoon, a puzzled and baffled
man. Ling Chu, his impassive Chinese servant, had observed those symptoms
of perplexity before, but now there was something new in his master's
demeanour--a kind of curt irritation, an anxiety which in the Hunter of
Men had not been observed before.

The Chinaman went silently about the business of preparing his chief's
tea and made no reference to the tragedy or to any of its details. He had
set the table by the side of the bed, and was gliding from the room in
that cat-like way of his when Tarling stopped him.

"Ling Chu," he said, speaking in the vernacular, "you remember in
Shanghai when the 'Cheerful Hearts' committed a crime, how they used to
leave behind their _hong_?"

"Yes, master, I remember it very well," said Ling Chu calmly. "They were
certain words on red paper, and afterwards you could buy them from the
shops, because people desired to have these signs to show to their
friends."

"Many people carried these things," said Tarling slowly, "and the sign of
the 'Cheerful Hearts' was found in the pocket of the murdered man."

Ling Chu met the other's eyes with imperturbable calmness.

"Master," he said, "may not the white-faced man who is now dead have
brought such a thing from Shanghai? He was a tourist, and tourists buy
these foolish souvenirs."

Tarling nodded again.

"That is possible," he said. "I have already thought that such might have
been the case. Yet, why should he have this sign of the 'Cheerful Hearts'
in his pocket on the night he was murdered?"

"Master," said the Chinaman, "why should he have been murdered?"

Tarling's lips curled in a half smile.

"By which I suppose you mean that one question is as difficult to answer
as the other," he said. "All right, Ling Chu, that will do."

His principal anxiety for the moment was not this, or any other clue
which had been offered, but the discovery of Odette Rider's present
hiding-place. Again and again he turned the problem over in his mind. At
every point he was baffled by the wild improbability of the facts that he
had discovered. Why should Odette Rider be content to accept a servile
position in Lyne's Stores when her mother was living in luxury at
Hertford? Who was her father--that mysterious father who appeared and
disappeared at Hertford, and what part did he play in the crime? And if
she was