lantern while the other held out a light dustcoat. Craven tossed
it into the rickshaw and silently pointing toward the north,
climbed in. He leaned back and lit a cigarette. The men sprang
away in a quick dog-trot along the Bund, and then started to climb
the hillside at the back of the town. They wound slowly up the
narrow tortuous roads, past numberless villas, hung with lights,
from which voices floated out into the quiet air.

The moon was brilliant and the night wonderfully light, but Craven
paid no attention to the beauty of the scene or to the gaily lit
villas. Atherton's invitation had been curiously hard to decline
and even now an almost overpowering desire came over him to bid
his men retrace their steps to the harbour. Then hard on the heels
of that desire came thoughts that softened the hard lines that had
gathered about his mouth. He pitched his cigarette away as if with
it he threw from him an actual temptation, and resolutely put out
of his mind Atherton and the suggestion of flight.

Still climbing upward the rickshaw passed the last of the
outlying European villas and turned down a side road where there
were no houses. For a couple of miles the men raced along a level
track cut on the side of a hill that rose steeply on the one hand
and on the other fell away precipitously down to the sea until
they halted with a sudden jerk beside a wooden gateway with a
creeper-covered roof on either side of which two matsu trees stood
like tall sentinels.

Waiting by the open gate was a short, powerful looking Japanese
dressed in European clothes. He came forward as Craven alighted
and gathering up the coat and hat from the floor of the rickshaw,