Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/180

 the sound of muffled voices still came. But he could hear nothing clearly. So he crept still closer, until his body was against the door-frame itself. He was about to reach out a cautious hand and grasp the door-knob when he became suddenly and tinglingly aware that he was no longer standing in darkness. The electrics had been switched on behind him.

That discovery brought him wheeling about as though he had been shot. He found himself, even as his hand went to his hip, standing face to face with a straight-bodied and youthful-looking Japanese in a service coat. This was the valet, Kestner surmised, of whom Sadie Wimpel had spoken. And here, he further surmised, was as pretty a kettle of fish as a man could stumble into!

"You wish to see?"—the imperturbed voice inquired in excellent and most crisply enunciated English. He spoke very quietly, without surprise and without apprehension, with a fortitude that seemed reptilious in its casual intentness.

The two strangely divergent figures stood facing each other, studying each other in silent appraisal. Kestner stared at the immobile Oriental face; the oblique aloe-like eyes stared back at the scrutinising Secret Agent. Odd as those two figures were, they had one thing in common. Each man bore the consciousness of having achieved an area of authority; each man, in his own way, was plainly not unused to power. So that combative stare lasted for several seconds, and from it neither emerged in any way a victor. But to the silence there had to be an end.