Each door of each tiny room, which housed an individual or a whole family, had the name of the owner upon it, in Chinese characters, black and sprawling, on a red label; and at one whose paper name-plate was peeling off, Angela’s companion stopped.  “Li Hung Sun; we makee visit,” she announced, and opened the door without knocking.

Angela had seen furniture packing cases as big as that room, and extremely like it.  On one of the wooden walls, above a bunk which took up nearly half the space, were a rough shelf and a few cheap, Chinese panel pictures and posters.  Beside the bunk, and exactly the same height from the floor with its ragged strip of old matting was a box, in use as a table, covered with black oilcloth.  On this were grouped some toy chairs and chests, made of tiny seashells pasted on cardboard; a vase with one flower in it; a miniature mirror, and some fetish charms and photographs, evidently for sale.  But on the bunk itself lay a thing which made Angela forget all the surroundings.  A thin, stabbing pain shot through her heart, as if it had been pricked with a needle.  She was face to face with tragedy in a form hardly human; and though her plump little guide was smiling, Angela wished that she had listened to Nick’s advice.  For here was something never to be forgotten, something which would haunt her through years of dark hours, dreaming or waking.  She knew that the thought of this box of a room and what she now saw in it would come suddenly to darken bright moments, as the sun is all at once overcast by a black thundercloud; and that in the midst of some pleasure she would find herself wondering if the idol-like figure still lived and suffered.

A little bag of bones and yellow skin that once had been a man lay on the wooden bunk, whose hard surface was softened only by a piece of matting.  From the shrivelled face a pair of eyes looked up; deep-set, utterly tragic, utterly resigned.  The face might have been on earth for sixty or seventy years perhaps.  But the eyes were as old as the world, neither bright nor dull, yet wise with a terrible wisdom far removed from joy or sorrow.  The shrivelled shell of a body was a mere prison for a soul to which torture and existence had become inseparable, and almost equally unimportant.

“Oh, we ought not to come in!” Angela exclaimed involuntarily, on the threshold of this secret.

The weary face faintly smiled, with a smile like a dim gleam of light flickering over the features of a mummy.

“Come in.  Many people come see me,” said a voice as old as the eyes, and sad with the fatal sadness that has forgotten hope.  It was a very small, weak voice, almost like a voice heard at the other end of a long-distance telephone, and it spoke excellent English.

Silently Angela obeyed; and seeing a broken, cane-seated chair which she had not noticed before, dropped into it as the low voice asked her to sit down.  She was not afraid now, but sadness gripped her.