The waiter came in, laid our supper on the table, put the champagne in ice, and departed.  I offered Suzee the wine, but she said she had all the tea she could drink.  She was willing to eat, however, and we sat down to the table.

“I want you to tell me all about what happened at Sitka,” I said.  “How did poor old Hop Lee die?”

“Oh, it was all such a dreadful thing, Treevor,” she returned, spreading out both hands, on the wrists of which heavy silver bangles set with amethysts shone and tinkled.  “He went down one day to Fort Wrangle on business and when he came back one day after, he had a fearful cough, and then he got very ill and went to bed, and I sat beside him and he got worse and worse.  Oh, so bad, and the doctor came and he had very much medicine, and then his chest began to bleed, and he coughed very much blood for days and days and weeks, and I nursed him all that time, Treevor, all night long.  I got no sleep at all; oh, it was very, very bad.”

I looked at her curiously.  I could not somehow picture Suzee as the devoted nurse passing sleepless nights and never absent from the pillow of the suffering Hop Lee.

As I looked at her, I noticed the strange thickening of the features and darkening of the skin I had noted before at Sitka, and knew the blood was mounting into the face, though she could not blush, as the English girl blushes, red.

“It is really true, Treevor,” she said, in an aggrieved tone.

“I am not contradicting you,” I replied calmly, “go on.”

“At last he died,” she continued, though in rather a sulky tone, “and doctor said I might die too, I had made myself so ill, so thin with waiting on him.  My bones stuck out so,” she put her hands edgeways to her sides to indicate how her ribs, now remarkably well covered, had stood out from her sufferings; but remembering the fictitious blows she had recounted to me when I first met her, I was not so much stirred by her recital as I might otherwise have been.

“And what about the child?” I asked.

“The boy?  Oh, Treevor, he died very soon after.  He caught cold from his father, I think.”

“Did he die of cold and cough, too, then?” I asked.

“Yes, he coughed till he died.  Oh, I cried so much when he died.  My baby boy, my very big baby, I did love him so.”

She blinked her glorious eyes very much as if they were full of tears at the recollection, but I did not see any fall, and she pursued her supper without any interruption of appetite.

I sat back in my chair, watching her and musing.  Poor old Hop Lee!  I wondered what his last moments had been like, and whether those dainty fingers had really been employed smoothing his brow, or counting his effects, at the last?

“And then what came after?” I asked.  “How did it come that you were to be sold, as you said?”

“We were very poor when he died; so poor, and we owed a lot, and his brother came up from Juneau and took over the tea-shop and everything.  Then he said he had offer from big Chinaman who would buy me, and he said my husband owe him lot of money, he sell me, get it back, and he sent me down to Nanine in ’Frisco to give to big Chinaman; but I told Nanine you would give more, so Nanine kept me for you.”