A Chinaman was bending over her.  His hands were tucked in his loose sleeves.  He smiled, and his smile was hideous but friendly.  He was strangely like Sin Sin Wa, save that he did not lack an eye.

Rita found herself lying in an untidy bed in a room laden with opium fumes and dimly lighted.  On a table beside her were the remains of a meal.  She strove to recall having partaken of food, but was unsuccessful. . . .

There came a blank—­then a sharp, stabbing pain in her right arm.  She thought it was the knife, and shrieked wildly again and again. . . .

Years seemingly elapsed, years of agony spent amid oblique eyes which floated in space unattached to any visible body, amid reeking fumes and sounds of ceaseless conflict.  Once she heard the cry of some bird, and thought it must be the parakeet which eternally sat on a branch of a lonely palm in the heart of the Great Sahara. . . .  Then, one night, when she lay shrinking from the plucking yellow hands which reached out of the darkness: 

“Tell me your dream,” boomed a deep, mocking voice; “and I will read its portent!”

She opened her eyes.  She lay in the untidy bed in the room which was laden with the fumes of opium.  She stared upward at the low, dirty ceiling.

“Why do you come to me with your stories of desperation?” continued the mocking voice.  “You have insisted upon seeing me.  I am here.”

Rita managed to move her head so that she could see more of the room.

On a divan at the other end of the place, propped up by a number of garish cushions, Rita beheld Mrs. Sin.  The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers.  Her face wore an expression of mystic rapture, like that characterizing the features of some Chinese Buddhas. . . .

In the other corner of the divan, contemplating her from under heavy brows, sat Kazmah. . . .

CHAPTER XXXVI

SAM TUK MOVES

Chinatown was being watched as Chinatown had never been watched before, even during the most stringent enforcement of the Defence of the Realm Act.  K Division was on its mettle, and Scotland Yard had sent to aid Chief Inspector Kerry every man that could be spared to the task.  The River Police, too, were aflame with zeal; for every officer in the service whose work lay east of London Bridge had appropriated to himself the stigma implied by the creation of Lord Wrexborough’s commission.

“Corners” in foodstuffs, metals, and other indispensable commodities are appreciated by every man, because every man knows such things to exist; but a corner in drugs was something which the East End police authorities found very difficult to grasp.  They could not free their minds of the traditional idea that every second Chinaman in the Causeway was a small importer.  They were seeking a hundred lesser stores instead of one greater one.  Not all Seton’s quiet explanations nor Kerry’s savage language could wean the higher local officials from their ancient beliefs.  They failed to conceive the idea of a wealthy syndicate conducted by an educated Chinaman and backed, covered, and protected by a crooked gentleman and accomplished man of affairs.