He turned to examine the window.  There was no doubt that Shan Tung had come in that way.  Both the sill and curtain bore stains of water and mud, and there was wet dirt on the floor.  For once the immaculate oriental had paid no attention to his feet.  At the door leading into the big room Keith saw where he had stood for some time, listening, probably when McDowell and Mary Josephine were in the outer room waiting for him.  Suddenly his eyes riveted themselves on the middle panel of the door.  Brady had intended his color scheme to be old ivory—­the panel itself was nearly white—­and on it Shan Tung had written heavily with a lead pencil the hour of his presence, “10.45 P.M.”  Keith’s amazement found voice in a low exclamation.  He looked at his watch.  It was a quarter-hour after twelve.  He had returned to the Shack before ten, and the clever Shan Tung was letting him know in this cryptic fashion that for more than three-quarters of an hour he had listened at the door and spied upon him and Mary Josephine through the keyhole.

Had even such an insignificant person as Wallie been guilty of that act, Keith would have felt like thrashing him.  It surprised himself that he experienced no personal feeling of outrage at Shan Tung’s frank confession of eavesdropping.  A subtle significance began to attach itself more and more to the story his room was telling him.  He knew that Shan Tung had left none of the marks of his presence out of bravado, but with a definite purpose.  Keith’s psychological mind was at all times acutely ready to seize upon possibilities, and just as his positiveness of Conniston’s spiritual presence 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.