Closer she came, and closer, until she could whisper in my ear.

“Hide me from your police, from him, from everybody, and I will no longer be his slave.”

My heart was beating with painful rapidity.  I had not counted on this warring with a woman; moreover, it was harder than I could have dreamt of.  For some time I had been aware that by the charm of her personality and the art of her pleading she had brought me down from my judgment seat—­ had made it all but impossible for me to give her up to justice.  Now, I was disarmed—­but in a quandary.  What should I do?  What could I do?  I turned away from her and walked to the hearth, in which some paper ash lay and yet emitted a faint smell.

Not more than ten seconds elapsed, I am confident, from the time that I stepped across the room until I glanced back.  But she had gone!

As I leapt to the door the key turned gently from the outside.

“Ma ’alesh!” came her soft whisper; “but I am afraid to trust you—­yet.  Be comforted, for there is one near who would have killed you had I wished it.  Remember, I will come to you whenever you will take me and hide me.”

Light footsteps pattered down the stairs.  I heard a stifled cry from Mrs. Dolan as the mysterious visitor ran past her.  The front door opened and closed.

CHAPTER V

“Shen-Yan’s is a dope-shop in one of the burrows off the old Ratcliff Highway,” said Inspector Weymouth.

“`Singapore Charlie’s,’ they call it.  It’s a center for some of the Chinese societies, I believe, but all sorts of opium-smokers use it.  There have never been any complaints that I know of.  I don’t understand this.”

We stood in his room at New Scotland Yard, bending over a sheet of foolscap upon which were arranged some burned fragments from poor Cadby’s grate, for so hurriedly had the girl done her work that combustion had not been complete.

“What do we make of this?” said Smith. “`. . .Hunchback. . .lascar went up . . . unlike others . . . not return . . . till Shen-Yan’ (there is no doubt about the name, I think) `turned me out . . . booming sound . . . lascar in . . . mortuary I could ident . . . not for days, or suspici . . .  Tuesday night in a different make . . . snatch . . . pigtail . . .’”

“The pigtail again!” rapped Weymouth.

“She evidently burned the torn-out pages all together,” continued Smith.  “They lay flat, and this was in the middle.  I see the hand of retributive justice in that, Inspector.  Now we have a reference to a hunchback, and what follows amounts to this:  A lascar (amongst several other persons) went up somewhere—­ presumably upstairs—­at Shen-Yan’s, and did not come down again.  Cadby, who was there disguised, noted a booming sound.  Later, he identified the lascar in some mortuary.  We have no means of fixing the date of this visit to Shen-Yan’s,