He spoke to them, but he had picked up Hilda’s photograph, and was looking not at them but at it.

They paid his question as little heed as the photograph did in its frame. They had no answer to give him. And he got none—unless he could piece one out from the hubbub that bubbled up from the sweating, teeming wharf, from the screaming, pushing coolie women in the sampans, from the pandemonium of noises and of smells that seethed up from a hundred junks, and from the mighty conglomerate waterside life and boat life that is the Greater Hong Kong. For there are two Hong Kongs—one old and shabby and battered, one smiling and well kept; and the smiling city on the hill-sides is Hong Kong the Little.

CHAPTER XXVI
Suspense

THE three sat brooding in silence for several minutes, until one of the native clerks came in and held the door open respectfully. That meant that the chief was coming, and Murray slid off his perch and slipped quietly out as Gregory came slowly in.

In the unsparing afternoon light he looked a broken lion—an old king-beast with sagging skin and weakened mouth, but with fierce fight still in his tired and anxious eyes.

Hunters know that the smaller breeds of lions are the most dangerous. Robert Gregory was not a large man—he barely reached his wife’s good inches. But he was jungle-fierce and jungle-strong. He had fought many a hard fight and had been torn and scarred in fights, but he had never lost one yet. He had pounded his way through the world, butted his way to victory and wealth. He had no finesse and no super-judgment, but he had splendid pluck, lion courage, bulldog pertinacity; and often for his wife, and for his daughter always, he had the charming tenderness that bulldogs show to children.

There was a hint of unscrupulousness in his face, and he had a jaw of iron. He was a very thin man, and it saved him from looking a very common one.

He was scrupulously dressed—now as ever—and, now as ever, just a shade over-dressed. His appearance would have gained had his watch-chain been a trifle slenderer, his cummerbund a less youthful rose, the canary-colored diamond in his ring half its size, or, better still, not worn. But his small, well-kept hands were dark, and unmistakably the hands of a man. He wore a bangle—just a thread of twined gold set with two or three inferior turquoise, and it kept slipping down his arm, almost over his knuckles—a cheap thing that had cost less than his cravat. Hilda had given it to him several years ago.

He came in deliberately—almost as if he too were very tired or beaten by the day’s terrific heat—but with a determined air of briskness, and nodded crisply to Carruthers and Holman as he took his own chair at his own desk.