ew in him ached for
rest. His head was sunk over a table in his flat. Lyne's diaries stood in
two piles on the table, the bigger pile that which he had read, the
lesser being those which Tarling had yet to examine.

The diaries had been blank books containing no printed date lines. In
some cases one book would cover a period of two or three years, in other
cases three or four books would be taken up by the record of a few
months. The pile on the left grew, and the pile on the right became
smaller, until there was only one book--a diary newer than the others
which had been fastened by two brass locks, but had been opened by the
Scotland Yard experts.

Tarling took up this volume and turned the leaves. As he had expected, it
was the current diary--that on which Thornton Lyne had been engaged at
the time of his murder. Tarling opened the book in a spirit of
disappointment. The earlier books had yielded nothing save a revelation
of the writer's egotism. He had read Lyne's account of the happenings in
Shanghai, but after all that was nothing fresh, and added little to the
sum of the detective's knowledge.

He did not anticipate that the last volume would yield any more promising
return for his study. Nevertheless, he read it carefully, and presently
drawing a writing pad toward him, he began to note down excerpts from the
diary. There was the story, told in temperate language and with
surprising mildness, of Odette Rider's rejection of Thornton Lyne's
advances. It was a curiously uninteresting record, until he came to a
date following the release of Sam Stay from gaol, and here Thornton Lyne
enlarged upon the subject of his "humiliation."

"Stay is out of prison," the entry ran. "It is pathetic to see how
this man adores me. I almost wish sometimes that I could keep him
out of gaol; but if I did so, and converted him into a dull,
respectable person, I should miss these delicious experiences which
his worship affords. It is good to bask in the bright sunlight of
his adoration! I talked to him of Odette. A strange matter to
discuss with a lout, but he was so wonderful a listener! I
exaggerated, the temptation was great. How he loathed her by the
time I was through ... he actually put forward a plan to 'spoil her
looks,' as he put it. He had been working in the same prison gang as
a man who was undergoing a term of penal servitude for 'doing in'
his girl that way .