Read Online The Yellow Snake by Edgar Wallace - Free Book Online

privacy.
        "What do you want?" he asked. "You've made a mistake, haven't you? This is a private office——"
        "No mistake at all," said the stranger, and, hearing his voice, the girl turned and looked at him in amazement. "All the mistakes are on your side, Narth, and you never made a bigger mistake than when you had the audacity to ask my future wife to sit at the same table as this damned murdering Chink! Fing-Su!"
        Mr St Clay, BA, covered his hands mechanically.
        "Excellency!" he said in the Mandarin tongue.
        Joan uttered a gasp of amazement. The best-looking man in China had not exaggerated his attraction—for the stranger in the doorway was Clifford Lynne!
     

 
CHAPTER TEN
     
     
        Fing-Su's embarrassment was only of the shortest duration. The folded arms came apart, the shrinking figure gained a new and sudden poise, and Grahame St Clay was his European self again. Into the dark eyes came a malignant fire which made him of a sudden a figure of terror. Only for the fraction of a second did the beast in him raise his head. The light died; he was his old pedantic self.
        "This intrusion is perfectly unwarrantable," he said in a^ queer, staccato tone which in any other circumstances would have been ludicrous.
        Clifford Lynne's eyes were on the white table with its silver, glass and flowers, and then they slowly strayed to the girl, and he smiled. And this strange man had the most beautiful smile the girl had ever seen.
        "If you can endure me through a meal," he said, "I should like to be your host."
        Joan nodded.
        She was frightened in a breathless, pleasant way, but immensely interested. She would not have been human had she been otherwise. These two men were enemies, bitter and remorseless, and now she understood, as clearly as though the story had been told to her, the significance of the snake which had wriggled from the box in the drawing-room at Sunningdale. St Clay had sent it. This suave Chinaman whom Clifford Lynne had called Fing-Su! And as this realization came to her, she turned pale, and moved unconsciously nearer to the intruder.
        "Mr Narth!"
        Fing-Su was speaking with difficulty. The rage in him was boiling up through the veneer which the university had given him, and his voice was tremulous, almost tearful.
        "You have invited me—to lunch with this lady. You are not to allow this——" Here he choked.
        Stephen Narth felt it was a moment when he might at least attempt to assert his personality.
        "Joan, you will stay here," he commanded.
        That was easy enough to say. What tone he must adopt to the man in the doorway was another and more difficult matter. If the odd-looking apparition of Sunningdale had been difficult to deal with, this cool and debonair man-about-town was much more of a problem.
        "Um—Mr Lynne——" he began, mildly enough. "This is extremely awkward. I have asked Joan to lunch with our friend——"
        "Your friend," said Lynne quickly, "not mine! It might occur to you, Narth, that I should wish to be consulted before you issue invitations to my future wife, and ask her to lunch with a man who regards assassination as a remedy for most difficulties that come his way!"
        He beckoned Joan to him with a slight jerk of his head, and meekly she went to him. Mr Narth had not even the courage to be angry.
        Lynne stood aside for a moment to let the girl pass into the outer office, then he turned.
        "Three of you people are playing with fire, and one of you is playing with hell," he said slowly. "Spedwell, you were once an officer in the British Army, and presumably you have the atrophied qualities of a gentleman somewhere in your composition. I am not going to appeal to that tattered remnant, but to your sense of self-preservation. There's a gallows ahead of you, my man—fifty seconds' walk from the condemned cell to