He did not see her face, although, as by law obliged, she carried a lantern, but she saw his, clear-cut in the white moonlight, a late, just-rising moon, and for an instant she turned as if to speak to him; but she thought better of it, and walked quietly but quickly away.
Bradley wondered who she was—up to no special harm, he hoped. It did not occur to him that her gait was familiar, at least not individually so—thousands of amahs walk so. But he noticed that her coarse blue clothes looked very clean—as clean and as blue as the blue house of Yat Jung How.
He went home then, and Ah Wong went too, back to the hotel, slipping out of the Chinese quarter stealthily, but going along the Praya unconcernedly and through Queen’s Road and Ice House Street, and up the long climb to the Peak, and past the night watchman at the hotel door. She had a night-police pass; and her mistress had given her leave to spend the evening on some errand of her own.
It’s a long climb up Hong Kong Peak. Ah Wong was very strong, but her indefatigable little feet ached when she slipped into the room where she had locked the flowers almost twelve hours ago, and day was slipping rosy up the sky.
Day was coming, but she did not lift a blind. She lit a candle. And when she had laid off the long blue cloth in which she had veiled herself, closely in the Chinese quarter, carelessly in English-town, she took from her dress the spoil of her visit to Yat Jung How’s blue house: three bottles.
The smallest of the three was filled (it was very small) with a few drops of opalescent green liquid. Ah Wong studied it grimly awhile, and then she knotted the phial in some corner of her garments, and tucked it securely back inside her dress.
The second bottle held about a dram of something that smelt disagreeably when she uncorked it; but she kept it well away from her own face and nose, and turned it instantly into the moss in the basket. It was deadly poison this, and would destroy any reptile or scorpion thing that came within a yard of it, and so potent was it that being near it would render any other poison quite innocuous—Yat had told her so. And she trusted Yat Jung How. She had known a way to make him trustworthy.
The third bottle was a generous, roomy receptacle, squat but wide. It held nearly a pint. And this was disinfectant, warranted to purify a poisoned room, and smelt of an acceptable cool pungence as Ah Wong threw it lavishly about the room, until she had spilled the last drop.
Then she lit several handfuls of joss-sticks and pulled up the blinds. But she did not unlock the doors, or leave one unlocked when at last she left the room, to sit outside it till her lady called. She intended that no one but she should pass into that room until the Kowloon flowers were all dead, and she had won Mrs. Gregory’s permission to burn them herself, basket and all.
The sweet pungence of the joss-sticks came to her from under the door. From under the room’s other door no doubt it was filling her mistress’s chamber with thick sweetness—but that was well, for the English lady loved the smell. Mr. Gregory did not especially. Quite possibly he might swear a little in his sleep. But he often swore in his sleep. Ah Wong had heard him.