“Just before the policeman came along, he went back to his bicycle and rode away, but after the policeman had passed, he came back again and stood leaning on the gate until the front door of Mayfield opened. Then he sort of slunk back to his bicycle and rode in the opposite direction. I mean opposite to the way he had come. He had hardly got out of sight before I saw the lady come down and open the gates. Soon after, she brought out the car, got down, closed the gates again, and drove away. And then I saw the Chinaman riding behind and pedalling like mad as if he was trying to catch up to the car.”
“Extraordinary!” said Mr. Stott. “This happened once?”
“It happened every night—Friday was the last night,” said Eline impressively, “the lady in the car, the Chinaman and everything. But on Sunday night two Chinamen came and one went into the garden and was there for a long time. I knew the other one was a Chinaman because he walked so curiously. But they didn’t come on bicycles. They had a car which stopped at the far end of the street.”
“Remarkable!” said Mr. Stott, and stroked his smooth face.
Eline had finished her story but was reluctant to surrender her position as news gleaner.
“The police have been taking things away from the house all day,” reported the observer, “boxes and trunks. The girl at Pine Lodge told me that they are leaving there tonight. They’ve been keeping guard on the house ever since the murder.”
“Very, very extraordinary; very remarkable,” said Mr. Stott. “But I don’t think that it is any business of ours. No. Thank you, Eline. I should certainly have that tooth out. You mustn’t be a baby and American dentistry has reached such a high level of efficiency that—”
Eline listened respectfully but nervously and went up to her room to plug the aching molar with Dr. Billbery’s Kure-Ake.
It seemed to Mr. Stott that his head had scarcely touched the pillow before there came a knock upon the panel of his bedroom door.
“Yes?” he asked fiercely in case it was a burglar, who was in this polite manner seeking admission to his chamber.
“It is Eline, sir—they’re there!”
Mr. Stott shivered and, conquering an almost irresistible desire to pull the bedclothes over his head and pretend that he had been talking in his sleep, he got reluctantly out of bed and pulled on his dressing-gown. As to Mrs. Stott, she never moved. She went to bed, as she had often said, to sleep.
“What is it, Eline—waking me up at this time in the morning?” asked Mr. Stott irritably.
“They are there—the Chinamen. I saw one getting through the window,” said the girl, her teeth chattering to the serious disturbance of Dr. Billbery’s Kure-Ake.
“Wait a moment until I get my stick.”
Mr. Stott kept hanging to his bed-rail, a heavily loaded cane. He had no intention of going nearer to Mayfield than the safe side of his dining-room window, but the holding of the stick gave him the self-confidence of which he was in need.
Cautiously the girl let up the blind of the dining-room window and unfastened the catch. The sash slid up noiselessly and gave them an interrupted view of Mayfield.
“There’s one!” whispered Eline.
Standing in the shadow was a figure. Mr. Stott saw it plainly. They watched in silence for the greater part of half-an-hour. Mr. Stott had an idea that he ought to telephone for the police, but refrained. In the case of ordinary burglars, he would not have hesitated. But these were Chinese, notoriously clannish and vengeful. He had read stories, in which Chinamen had inflicted diabolical injuries upon men who had betrayed them.
At the end of the half-hour’s vigil, the door of Mayfield opened and a man came out and joined the other. Together they walked up the road and that was the last Mr. Stott saw of them.
“Very remarkable!” said Mr. Stott profoundly. “I’m glad you called me, Eline. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. But you must say nothing about this, Eline—nothing. The Chinese people are very bloodthirsty. They would think no more of putting you into a barrel full of sharp pointed nails and rolling you down a hill, than I should think of—er—lacing my shoes.”
So Maple Manor kept its grisly secret and none knew of Yeh Ling’s visit to the house of death or his search for the tiny lacquer box wherein Jesse Trasmere kept a folded sheet of thin paper elegantly inscribed in Chinese characters by Yeh Ling, in his own hand.
XII
“Ursula Ardfern is leaving the stage and is going to live in the country.”
Tab made the announcement one evening when he came home from the office.
Rex scarcely seemed interested.
“Oh?” said Rex.
That was all he said. He seemed as disinclined as Tab to discuss the lady.
It was his last night at the Doughty Street flat. He was still suffering from shock, and his doctor had advised a trip abroad. He had suggested that at the end of his vacation he would return to Doughty Street, but on this point Tab was firm.
“You have a lot of money, Babe,” he said seriously, “and a man who has a lot of money has also a whole lot of responsibilities. There are about a hundred and forty-five reasons why our little ménage should be broken up, and the most important from my point of view is, that I will not be demoralized by living cheek by jowl with a man of millions. You have a certain place to take in society, certain duties to perform, and you can’t keep up the position that you are entitled to keep, in a half-flat in Doughty Street. I don’t suppose you ever want to go to Mayfield to live.”
Rex shuddered.
“I don’t,” he said
