Late in January, and a snowy twilight. Routledge stood for a moment on the Bund in Shanghai. He was sailing that night for Chifu, and wondering as he stood in the falling dark, his face concealed in the high-collar, how fared Jerry Cardinegh in the crux of these great affairs. Was he dead--or dead in brain only? Of Noreen--thoughts of Noreen were always with him. One of the launches of an Empress liner was leaving the Bund in a few minutes for the ship in the offing--her nose turned to Japan. Routledge was thinking that he would have to play the game alone now, if never before. He smiled at the thought of what the boys gathering at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo would do if he should turn up among them.... Suddenly he felt a man’s eyes fixed upon him from the right. He turned his head carelessly, and discovered a figure marvelously like Finacune’s stepping overside into the launch. It disappeared into the small cabin. Routledge turned his back to the launch with that degraded, shrunken sensation which concealment always incited. “They would murder me,” he muttered absently. “I must swing it more than ever alone--from the edges and alone.” A woman’s hand touched the sleeve of the great frieze coat, and Routledge jerked about in a startled way. Men and wars were obliterated like dry leaves in a flame.... The launch whistled a last time. TWELFTH CHAPTER JOHNNY BRODIE OF BOOKSTALLS IS INVITED TO CHEER STREET, AND BOLTS, PERCEIVING A CONSPIRACY FORMED AGAINST HIM Jerry Cardinegh experienced a very swift and remarkable transition. All the red-blooded hatred with which he had executed his _coup_ in India was drained from the man sitting in London. His gigantic scheme accomplished, Cardinegh withered like a plant overturned in a furrow. Instead of facing the consequences with the same iron humor that he had faced the wars of his time--as he had planned for months, in the event of discovery--his great mad zeal had burned him out. He found himself old, run-down, pitiful, hungering for peace, when his young Messiah had come--praying for the imperial stimulus of English hatred in order to write a great book of the craft. In his weakness and in the powerful attraction of home and Noreen, Cardinegh had not analyzed the idea seized at random by Routledge. Later he was incapable. Always the young man had been strange in his ways and startling in his achievements. Jerry had sensed the crush of this thing which the other demanded for a stimulant. Vaguely, the old man pictured from time to time the “mystic of the wars” sunk and steeped somewhere in India, turning out stupendous narratives under the goad of secrecy and peril.