a moment, her slim figure was
profiled in a frame of vivid light. Her mother must have been
beautiful. That was the thought that flashed upon him as the room and
its tragic memory lay before him. Everything came back to him vividly,
and he was astonished at the few changes in it. There was the big chair
with its leather arms, in which the overfatted creature who had been
her father was sitting when he came in. It was the same table, too, and
it seemed to him that the same odds and ends were on the mantel over
the cobblestone fireplace. And there was somebody's picture of the
Madonna still hanging between two windows. The Madonna, like the master
of the house, had been too fat to be beautiful. The son, an ogreish
pattern of his father, had stood with his back to the Madonna, whose
overfat arms had seemed to rest on his shoulders. He remembered that.

The girl was watching him closely when he turned toward her. He had
frankly looked the room over, without concealing his intention. She was
breathing a little unsteadily, and her hair was shimmering gloriously
in the light of an overhead chandelier. She sat down with that light
over her, motioning him to be seated opposite her--across the same
table from which he had snatched the copper weight that had killed
Kirkstone. He had never seen anything quite so steady, quite so
beautiful as her eyes when they looked across at him. He thought of
McDowell's suspicion and of Shan Tung and gripped himself hard. The
same strange perfume hung subtly on the air he was breathing. On a
small silver tray at his elbow lay the ends of three freshly burned
cigarettes.

"Of course you remember this room?"

He nodded. "Yes. It was night when I came, like this. The next day I
went after John Keith."

She leaned toward him, her hands clasped in front of her on the table.
"You will tell me the truth about John Keith?" she asked in a low,
tense voice. "You swear that it will be the truth?"

"I will keep nothing back from you that I have told Inspector
McDowell," he answered, fighting to meet her eyes steadily. "I almost
believe I may tell you more."

"Then--did you speak the truth when you reported to Inspector McDowell?
IS JOHN KEITH DEAD?" Could Shan Tung meet those wonderful eyes as he
was meeting them now, he wondered? Could he face them and master them,
as McDowell had hinted? To McDowell the lie had come easily to his
tongue. It stuck in his throat now. Without giving him time to prepa