He listened for a moment.
"The others are going downstairs," he said. "I must be there to see them out, and I have one or two little transactions—"
He felt in a villainous side pocket and I knew as well as possible what it contained, and what would be handed to one or two of the moon-faced gentlemen as they slipped out of the side door on their way home.
Bill came back in some twenty minutes.
"Now," he said, "I'm going upstairs to wake Pu-Yi and bring him down to you. You must remember, Sir Thomas, that I am only a dirty little servant. I am as far beneath a man like Pu-Yi as Sir Thomas Kirby is above Stanley Whistlecraft, so I cannot be present at your interview. My idea was that I should creep into the bar—Stanley will have had his supper and gone to bed—and lie down on the floor with my ear to the bottom of the door, then I can hear everything."
"That's a good idea," I said, for I was beginning to realize what an enormous lot might depend upon this interview. Then I thought of something else.
"Look here, Bill, you must remember this too. I fished the blighter out of the Thames and no doubt he will be thankful in his overdone, Oriental fashion. But to him, a man of the class you say he is, I shall be nothing but a vulgar publican, and I don't see quite what's going to come out of that!"
He had slipped the gutta-percha pads out of his cheeks—an operation to which I had grown quite accustomed—and I could see his face as it really was.
"That's occurred to me also," he replied, "but somehow or other I'm sure the fates are on our side to-night."
He arose, turned away for a moment, there was a click and a gasp, and he was the little impassive Oriental again. He glided up to me, put his yellow hand with the long, polished finger nails upon my shoulder, and said in my ear: