ty until he got back to the Yard,
where the experts would make short work of the best locks which were ever
invented. Whilst he sat watching the thing upon the table and turning
over in his mind the possibility of its contents, he heard footsteps pass
his door and mount the stairway opposite which his sitting-room was
situated. Visitors in the same plight as himself, he thought.

Somehow, being in a strange room amidst unfamiliar surroundings, gave the
case a new aspect. It was an aspect of unreality. They were all so
unreal, the characters in this strange drama.

Thornton Lyne seemed fantastic, and fantastic indeed was his end.
Milburgh, with his perpetual smirk, his little stoop, his broad, fat face
and half-bald head; Mrs. Rider, a pale ghost of a woman who flitted in
and out of the story, or rather hovered about it, never seeming to
intrude, yet never wholly separated from its tragic process; Ling Chu,
imperturbable, bringing with him the atmosphere of that land of intrigue
and mystery and motive, China. Odette Rider alone was real. She was life;
warm, palpitating, wonderful.

Tarling frowned and rose stiffly from his chair. He despised himself a
little for this weakness of his. Odette Rider! A woman still under
suspicion of murder, a woman whom it was his duty, if she were guilty, to
bring to the scaffold, and the thought of her turned him hot and cold!

He passed through to his bedroom which adjoined the sitting-room, put the
wallet on a table by the side of his bed, locked the bedroom door, opened
the windows and prepared himself, as best he could, for the night.

There was a train leaving Hertford at five in the morning and he had
arranged to be called in time to catch it. He took off his boots, coat,
vest, collar and tie, unbuckled his belt--he was one of those eccentrics
to whom the braces of civilisation were anathema--and lay down on the
outside of the bed, pulling the eiderdown over him. Sleep did not come to
him readily. He turned from side to side, thinking, thinking, thinking.

Suppose there had been some mistake in the time of the accident at
Ashford? Suppose the doctors were wrong and Thornton Lyne was murdered
at an earlier hour? Suppose Odette Rider was in reality a
cold-blooded----. He growled away the thought.

He heard the church clock strike the hour of two and waited impatiently
for the quarter to chime--he had heard every quarter since he had retired
to bed. But he did not hear that quart