The diminutive Jap had noiselessly opened the door of the little dining-room in which the table was set for two.

Keith smiled as he sat down opposite the man who would have sent him to the executioner had he known the truth.  After all, it was but a step from comedy to tragedy.  And just now he was conscious of a bit of grisly humor in the situation.

VIII

The storm had settled into a steady drizzle when McDowell left the Shack at two o’clock.  Keith watched the iron man, as his tall, gray figure faded away into the mist down the slope, with a curious undercurrent of emotion.  Before the inspector had come up as his guest he had, he thought, definitely decided his future action.  He would go west on his furlough, write McDowell that he had decided not to reenlist, and bury himself in the British Columbia mountains before an answer could get back to him, leaving the impression that he was going on to Australia or Japan.  He was not so sure of himself now.  He found himself looking ahead to the night, when he would see Miriam Kirkstone, and he no longer feared Shan Tung as he had feared him a few hours before.  McDowell himself had given him new weapons.  He was unofficially on Shan Tung’s trail.  McDowell had frankly placed the affair of Miriam Kirkstone in his hands.  That it all had in some mysterious way something to do with himself—­John Keith—­urged him on to the adventure.

He waited impatiently for the evening.  Wallie, smothered in a great raincoat, he sent forth on a general foraging expedition and to bring up some of Conniston’s clothes.  It was a quarter of eight when he left for Miriam Kirkstone’s home.

Even at that early hour the night lay about him heavy and dark and saturated with a heavy mist.  From the summit of the hill he could no longer make out the valley of the Saskatchewan.  He walked down into a pit in which the scattered lights of the town burned dully like distant stars.  It was a little after eight when he came to the Kirkstone house.  It was set well back in an iron-fenced area thick with trees and shrubbery, and he saw that the porch light was burning to show him the way.  Curtains were drawn, but a glow of warm light lay behind them.

He was sure that Miriam Kirkstone must have heard the crunch of his feet on the gravel walk, for he had scarcely touched the old-fashioned knocker on the door when the door itself was opened.  It was Miriam who greeted him.  Again he held her hand for a moment in his own.

It was not cold, as it had been in McDowell’s office.  It was almost feverishly hot, and the pupils of the girl’s eyes were big, and dark, and filled with a luminous fire.  Keith might have thought that coming in out of the dark night he had startled her.  But it was not that.  She was repressing something that had preceded him.  He thought that he heard the almost noiseless closing of a door at the end of the long hall, and his nostrils