She ceased speaking abruptly, and abruptly resumed again: 

“And I do as you wish—­I do as you wish.  How can I keep her from it except by making the price so high that she cannot afford to buy it?  I tell you I do it.  I bargain for the pink and white boy, Quentin, because I want her to be indebted to him—­because I want her to be so sorry for him that she lets him take her away from you!  Why should you respect her—­”

Silence fell upon the drugged speaker.  Sin Sin Wa could be heard crooning softly about the Yellow River and the mountain gods who sent it sweeping down through the valleys where the opium-poppy grows.

“Go, Juan,” hissed Mrs. Sin.  “I say—­go!”

Her voice changed eerily to a deep, mocking bass; and Rita Irvin lying, a pallid wraith of her once lovely self, upon the untidy bed, stirred slightly—­her lashes quivering.  Her eyes opened and stared straightly upward at the low, dirty ceiling, horror growing in their shadowy depths.

CHAPTER XXXV

BEYOND THE VEIL

Rita Irvin’s awakening was no awakening in the usually accepted sense of the word; it did not even represent a lifting of the veil which cut her off from the world, but no more than a momentary perception of the existence of such a veil and of the existence of something behind it.  Upon the veil, in grey smoke, the name “Kazmah” was written in moving characters.  Beyond the veil, dimly divined, was life.

As of old the victims of the Inquisition, waking or dreaming, beheld ever before them the instrument of their torture, so before this woman’s racked and half-numbed mind panoramically passed, an endless pageant, the incidents of the night which had cut her off from living men and women.  She tottered on the border-line which divides sanity from madness.  She was learning what Sir Lucien had meant when, once, long long ago, in some remote time when she was young and happy and had belonged to a living world, he had said “a day is sure to come.”  It had come, that “day.”  It had dawned when she had torn the veil before Kazmah—­and that veil had enveloped her ever since.  All that had preceded the fatal act was blotted out, blurred and indistinct; all that had succeeded it lived eternally, passing, an endless pageant, before her tortured mind.

The horror of the moment when she had touched the hands of the man seated in the big ebony chair was of such kind that no subsequent terrors had supplanted it.  For those long, slim hands of the color of old ivory were cold, rigid, lifeless—­the hands of a corpse!  Thus the pageant began, and it continued as hereafter, memory and delusion taking the stage in turn.

* * * * *

Complete darkness came.

Rita uttered a wild cry of horror and loathing, shrinking back from the thing which sat in the ebony chair.  She felt that consciousness was slipping from her; felt herself falling, and shrieked to know herself helpless and alone with Kazmah.  She groped for support, but found none; and, moaning, she sank down, and was unconscious of her fall.