He did not anticipate that the last volume would yield any more promising return for his study. Nevertheless, he read it carefully, and presently drawing a writing pad toward him, he began to note down excerpts from the diary. There was the story, told in temperate language and with surprising mildness, of Odette Rider's rejection of Thornton Lyne's advances. It was a curiously uninteresting record, until he came to a date following the release of Sam Stay from gaol, and here Thornton Lyne enlarged upon the subject of his "humiliation." "Stay is out of prison," the entry ran. "It is pathetic to see how this man adores me. I almost wish sometimes that I could keep him out of gaol; but if I did so, and converted him into a dull, respectable person, I should miss these delicious experiences which his worship affords. It is good to bask in the bright sunlight of his adoration! I talked to him of Odette. A strange matter to discuss with a lout, but he was so wonderful a listener! I exaggerated, the temptation was great. How he loathed her by the time I was through ... he actually put forward a plan to 'spoil her looks,' as he put it. He had been working in the same prison gang as a man who was undergoing a term of penal servitude for 'doing in' his girl that way ... vitriol was used, and Sam suggested that he should do the work.... I was horrified, but it gave me an idea. He says he can give me a key that will open any door. Suppose I went ... in the dark? And I could leave a clue behind. What clue? Here is a thought. Suppose I left something unmistakably Chinese? Tarling had evidently been friendly with the girl ... something Chinese might place him under suspicion...." The diary ended with the word "suspicion," an appropriate ending. Tarling read the passages again and again until he almost had them by heart. Then he closed the book and locked it away in his drawer. He sat with his chin on his hand for half an hour. He was piecing together the puzzle which Thornton Lyne had made so much more simple. The mystery was clearing up. Thornton Lyne had gone to that flat not in response to the telegram, but with the object of compromising and possibly ruining the girl. He had gone with the little slip of paper inscribed with Chinese characters, intending to leave the Hong in a conspicuous place, that somebody else might be blamed for his infamy. Milburgh had been in the flat for another purpose. The two men had met; there had been a quarrel; and Milburgh had fired the fatal shot. That part of the story solved the mystery of Thornton Lyne's list slippers and his Chinese characters; his very presence there was cleared up. He thought of Sam Stay's offer.