“It would make you feel mighty sad, Mrs. May,” said Nick.  “I went once, and—­it kind of haunted me.  I thought to myself, I’d never take a woman who had a heart——­”

“I haven’t a heart,” laughed Angela, piqued.  “I’ve only a will.  But—­you’re my host, so I suppose I shall have to give my will up to yours.”

To her surprise, Nick did not yield.  “We’d better begin with the singing children,” he said to Schermerhorn, “and then we won’t feel we’re keeping them up late.”

The guide led them through Dupont Street, the street of the bazaars, and another smaller, less noisy street, where fat, long-gowned men, and women with gold clasps in their glittering edifices of ebony hair, chaffered for dried abalones, green sugarcane, and Chinese nuts.  In basements they could see through half-open doors at the bottom of ladderlike steps, earnest-faced men, with long, well-tended queues of hair, busily tonsuring sleepy clients.  Stooping merchants, with wrinkled brown masks like the soft shells of those nuts which others sold, could be discerned in dim, tiny offices, poring through huge round spectacles as they wrote with paint brushes, in volumes apparently made of brown paper.  Here and there, in a badly lit shop with a greenish glass window, an old chemist with the air of a wizard was measuring out for a blue-coated customer an ounce of dried lizard flesh, some powdered shark’s eggs, or slivered horns of mountain deer.  These things would cure chills and fever; many other diseases, too, and best of all, win love denied, or frighten away bad spirits.

By and by they turned out of the street into a dim passage.  This led into another, and so on, until Angela lost count.  But at last, when she began to think they must be threading a maze, they plunged into a little square court, where a lantern over one dark doorway showed faintly the blacks of irregularly built houses.  Several small windows which looked upon the court were barred, and there was a door with a grated peephole, where Angela fancied that she caught the glint of eyes as the lantern swung in a light breeze.  But there was no such grille in the low-browed door which the guide approached.  It stood ajar, and he pushed it open without knocking.

“Follow, please,” he said, “it’s better for me to go first.”  And Angela followed, with Nick close behind her, down a narrow flight of steps, more a ladder than a stairway, which descended abruptly from the threshold.  One, two, three flights there were, so steep that you had to go slowly or tumble on your nose, and then down at the bottom of the third ran a long passage, where a greenish yellow dusk from some unseen lamp prevailed.  The walls were of unpainted wood, made of slips as thin as laths, and several doors were roughly cut in it.  At the end, one of these doors gaped open, music of a peculiar shrillness floated out.  Also a smell as of musk and sandalwood drifted through the crack, with small, fitful trails of smoke or curling mist.