ce had inspired him to act
his lie with Mary Josephine, so did the conviction possess him now that
his room held for him a message of the most vital importance.

In such an emergency Keith employed his own method. He sat down,
lighted his pipe again, and centered the full resource of his mind on
Shan Tung, dissociating himself from the room and the adventure of the
night as much as possible in his objective analysis of the man. Four
distinct emotional factors entered into that analysis--fear, distrust,
hatred, personal enmity. To his surprise he found himself drifting
steadily into an unusual and unexpected mental attitude. From the time
he had faced Shan Tung in the inspector's office, he had regarded him
as the chief enemy of his freedom, his one great menace. Now he felt
neither personal enmity nor hatred for him. Fear and distrust remained,
but the fear was impersonal and the distrust that of one who watches a
clever opponent in a game or a fight. His conception of Shan Tung
changed. He found his occidental mind running parallel with the
oriental, bridging the spaces which otherwise it never would have
crossed, and at the end it seized upon the key. It proved to him that
his first impulse had been wrong. Shan Tung had not expected him to
seek safety in flight. He had given the white man credit for a larger
understanding than that. His desire, first of all, had been to let
Keith know that he was not the only one who was playing for big stakes,
and that another, Shan Tung himself, was gambling a hazard of his own,
and that the fraudulent Derwent Conniston was a trump card in that game.

To impress this upon Keith he had, first of all, acquainted him with
the fact that he had seen through his deception and that he knew he was
John Keith and not Derwent Conniston. He had also let him know that he
believed he had killed the Englishman, a logical supposition under the
circumstances. This information he had left for Keith was not in the
form of an intimidation. There was, indeed, something very near
apologetic courtesy in the presence of the card bearing Shan Tung's
compliments. The penciling of the hour on the panel of the door,
without other notation, was a polite and suggestive hint. He wanted
Keith to know that he understood his peculiar situation up until that
particular time, that he had heard and possibly seen much that had
passed between him and Mary Josephine. The partly opened window, the
mud and wet on curtains