Suzee gave a piercing shriek of dismay, and started to her feet.

“My husband!” she gasped.

I sprang to my feet, and my right hand went to my hip pocket.  The head pushed through the thicket, and a bent and aged form followed slowly.  I drew out my revolver, but the figure of the old man straightened itself up and he waved his hand impatiently, as if deprecating violence.

“Sir, I have come after my wife,” he said, in a low, broken tone.

I slipped the weapon back in my pocket.  I had had an idea that he might attack Suzee, but voice and face showed he was in a different mood.

Suzee clung to my hand on her knees, crying and trembling.

“Go and sit over there,” he said peremptorily to her, pointing to the other side of the glade, far enough from us to be out of hearing.

She did not move, only clung and shivered and wept as before.

I bent over her, loosening my hand.

“Do as he says,” I whispered; “no harm can come to you while I am here.”

Suzee let go my fingers reluctantly and crept away, sobbing, to the opposite edge of the thicket.  The old Chinaman motioned me to sit down.  I did so, mechanically wondering whether his calmness was a ruse under cover of which he would suddenly stab me.  He sat down, too, stiffly, beside me, resting on his heels, and his hard, wrinkled hands supporting his withered face.

“Now,” he said, in a thin old voice; “look at me!  I am an old man, you are a young one.  You are strong, you are well; you are rich too, I think.”  He looked critically over me.  “You have everything that I have not, already.  Why do you come here to rob an old man of all he has in this world?”

I felt myself colour with anger.  All the blood in my body seemed to rush to my head and stand singing in my ears.

I felt a furious impulse to knock him aside out of my way; but his age and weakness held me motionless.

“All my youth, when I was strong and good-looking as you are now, and women loved me, I worked hard like a slave, and starved and saved.  When others played I toiled, when they spent I hoarded up.  What was I saving for?  That I might buy myself that.”  He waved his hand in the direction of Suzee, sitting in a little crumpled heap against a gnarled tree opposite us.

“I bought her,” he went on with increasing excitement.  “I bought her from a woman who would have let her out, night by night, to foreigners.  I have given her a good home, she does no hard work.  She has a child, she has fine clothes.  I work still all day and every day that I may give money to her.  She is my one joy, my treasure; don’t take her away from me, don’t do it.  You have all the world before you, and all the women in it that are without husbands.  Go to them, leave me my wife in peace.”

Tears were rolling fast down his face now, his clasped hands quivered with emotion.