Kao leaned forward, his fingers interlacing eagerly.  “Ah, now you have asked the question, John Keith!  And we shall be friends, great friends, for you see with the eyes of wisdom.  It will be easy, so easy that you will wonder at the cheapness of the task.  Ten days ago Miriam Kirkstone was about to pay my price.  And then you came.  From that moment she saw you in McDowell’s office, there was a sudden change.  Why?  I don’t know.  Perhaps because of that thing you call intuition but to which we give a greater name.  Perhaps only because you were the man who had run down her father’s murderer.  I saw her that afternoon, before you went up at night.  Ah, yes, I could see, I could understand the spark that had begun to grow in her, hope, a wild, impossible hope, and I prepared for it by leaving you my message.  I went away.  I knew that in a few days all that hope would be centered in you, that it would live and die in you, that in the end it would be your word that would bring her to me.  And that word you must speak tonight.  You must go to her, hope-broken.  You must tell her that no power on earth can save her, and that Kao waits to make her a princess, that tomorrow will be too late, that tonight must the bargain be closed.  She will come.  She will save her brother from the hangman, and you, in bringing her, will save John Keith and keep Derwent Conniston’s sister.  Is it not a great reward for the little I am asking?”

It was Keith who now smiled into the eyes of the Chinaman, but it was a smile that did not soften that gray and rock-like hardness that had settled in his face.  “Kao, you are a devil.  I suppose that is a compliment to your dirty ears.  You’re rotten to the core of the thing that beats in you like a heart; you’re a yellow snake from the skin in.  I came to see you because I thought there might be a way out of this mess.  I had almost made up my mind to kill you.  But I won’t do that.  There’s a better way.  In half an hour I’ll be with McDowell, and I’ll beat you out by telling him that I’m John Keith.  And I’ll tell him this story of Miriam Kirkstone from beginning to end.  I’ll tell him of that dais you’ve built for her—­your sacrificial altar!—­and tomorrow Prince Albert will rise to a man to drag you out of this hole and kill you as they would kill a rat.  That is my answer, you slit-eyed, Yale-veneered yellow devil!  I may die, and Peter Kirkstone may die, but you’ll not get Miriam Kirkstone!”

He was on his feet when he finished, amazed at the calmness of his own voice, amazed that his hands were steady and his brain was cool in this hour of his sacrifice.  And Kao was stunned.  Before his eyes he saw a white man throwing away his life.  Here, in the final play, was a master-stroke he had not foreseen.  A moment before the victor, he was now the vanquished.  About him he saw his world falling, his power gone, his own life suddenly hanging by a thread.  In Keith’s face he read the truth.  This white man was not bluffing.  He would go to McDowell.  He would tell the truth.  This man who had ventured so much for his own life and freedom would now sacrifice that life to save a girl, one girl!  He could not understand, and yet he believed.  For it was there before his eyes in that gray, passionless face that was as inexorable as the face of one of his own stone gods.