The maid Chou Nu was left to shift for herself, and while Sofia could see her she did not shift a finger from her pose of terror, flattened to the wall.  When Sofia came back that way, the girl had vanished, however.  Nor was she seen again alive.

Her arms held fast, Sofia was partly led and partly dragged down the hall, Victor herding the group on past the staircase and into a bare room at the back of the house, where a solitary lamp burning on a deal table discovered for all other furnishing broken chairs, coils of tarred rope, a rack of ponderous oars and boat-hooks, a display of shapeless oilskins and sou’westers on pegs.  The windows were boarded up from sills to lintels, the air was close and dank with the stale flavour of foul tidal waters.

Here Victor took charge of Sofia, the chauffeur holding the lamp to light the other Chinaman at his labours with a trap-door in the floor, a slab of woodwork so massive that, when its iron bolts had been drawn, it needed every whit of the man’s strength to lift and throw it back upon its hinges; and its crashing fall made all the timbers quake and groan.

Through the square opening thus discovered Sofia saw a ladder of several slimy steps washed by black, oily waters that sucked and swirled sluggishly round spiles green with weed and ooze.

Down these steps the Chinaman crept gingerly, but halfway paused with a cry, then cringed back to the head of the ladder, yellow face blanched, slant eyes piteous with fear, as he exhibited an end of stout mooring line whose other end was made fast to a ring bolt in one of the joists.

With a smothered oath Victor snatched the rope’s end from the trembling hand and examined it closely.  Even Sofia could see that it had been cleanly severed by a knife.

Victor’s countenance was ablaze as he dropped the rope.  Before the tempest of his wrath the Chinaman bent like a reed, with faint, protesting bleats and feebly weaving hands.

But in full tide the tirade faltered, Victor seemed to forget his anger or else to remind himself it was puerile in contrast with the mortal issues that now confronted him.

He turned to Sofia eyes of cold fire in a wintry countenance.

“So,” he pronounced, slowly, “it appears you are to have your way, after all, and more speedily than either of us reckoned.  You are to die, and so am I, this day—­you in my arms.  Well, it is time, I daresay, when I permit myself to be duped and overreached by police spies like your persevering father and lover.  Yes; I am ready to pay the price of my fatuity—­but not until they had paid me for their victory—­and dearly.  Come!”

He motioned to the Chinese to reclose and fasten the trap-door, and grasping Sofia’s wrist with cruel fingers hurried her back through the hallway.

Repeated breaks of pistol-fire guided them to the front room, a racket echoed in diminished volume from the street.