“Another little sister, dear Lola,” murmured Kilfane.  “Of course, you know who it is?  This, my daughter,” turning the sleepy glance towards Rita, “is our officiating priestess, Mrs. Sin.”

The woman so strangely named revealed her gleaming teeth in a swift, unpleasant smile, then her nostrils dilated and she glanced about her suspiciously.

“Someone smokes the chandu cigarettes,” she said, speaking in a low tone which, nevertheless, failed to disguise her harsh voice, and with a very marked accent.

“I am the offender, dear Lola,” said Kilfane, dreamily waving his cigarette towards her.  “I have managed to make the last hundred spin out.  You have brought me a new supply?”

“Oh no, indeed,” replied Mrs. Sin, tossing her head in a manner oddly reminiscent of a once famous Spanish dancer.  “Next Tuesday you get some more.  Ah! it is no good!  You talk and talk and it cannot alter anything.  Until they come I cannot give them to you.”

“But it appears to me,” murmured Kilfane, “that the supply is always growing less.”

“Of course.  The best goes all to Edinburgh now.  I have only three sticks of Yezd left of all my stock.”

“But the cigarettes.”

“Are from Buenos Ayres?  Yes.  But Buenos Ayres must get the opium before we get the cigarettes, eh?  Five cases come to London on Tuesday, Cy.  Be of good courage, my dear.”

She patted the sallow cheek of the American with her jewelled fingers, and turned aside, glancing about her.

“Yes,” murmured Kilfane.  “We are all present, Lola.  I have had the room prepared.  Come, my children, let us enter the poppy portico.”

He opened a door and stood aside, waving one thin yellow hand between the first two fingers of which smouldered the drugged cigarette.  Led by Mrs. Sin the company filed into an apartment evidently intended for a drawing-room, but which had been hastily transformed into an opium divan.

Tables, chairs, and other items of furniture had been stacked against one of the walls and the floor spread with rugs, skins, and numerous silk cushions.  A gas fire was alight, but before it had been placed an ornate Japanese screen whereon birds of dazzling plumage hovered amid the leaves of gilded palm trees.  In the centre of the room stood a small card-table, and upon it were a large brass tray and an ivory pedestal exquisitely carved in the form of a nude figure having one arm upraised.  The figure supported a lamp, the light of which was subdued by a barrel-shaped shade of Chinese workmanship.

Mollie Gretna giggled hysterically.

“Make yourself comfortable, dear,” she cried to Rita, dropping down upon a heap of cushions stacked in a recess beside the fireplace.  “I am going to take off my shoes.  The last time, Cyrus, when I woke up my feet were quite numb.”

“You should come down to my place,” said Mrs. Sin, setting the leather case on the little card-table beside the lamp.  “You have there your own little room and silken sheets to lie in, and it is quiet—­so quiet.”