Thus the man. His mistress wished a word. It was odd. Who, what, would his mistress be!
Doane always made it a rule, in these caravansaries, to engage the “number one” room if it was to be had. A countryside inn, in China, is usually a walled rectangle of something less or more than a halfacre in extent. Across the front stands the innkeeper's house, and the immense, roofed, swinging gates, built of strong timbers and planks. Along one side wall extend the stables, where the animals stand a row, looking over the manger into the courtyard. Along the other side are cell-like rooms, usually on the same level as the ground, with floors of dirt or worn old tile, with a table, a narrow chair or two of bent wood, and the inevitable brick kang, or platform bed with a tiny charcoal stove built into it and a thickness or two of matting thrown over the dirt and insect life of the crumbling surface. At the end of the court opposite' the gate stands, nearly always, a small separate building, the floor raised two or three steps from the ground. This is, in the pidgin vernacular, the “number one” room. Usually, however, it is large enough for division into two or three rooms. In the present instance there were two rather large rooms on either side of an entrance hall. Doane had been ushered into one of these rooms with no thought for the possible occupant of the other, beyond sleepily noting that the door was closed.
Hastily brushing his hair and smoothing the wrinkles out of his coat he stepped across the hall. That other door was ajar now. He tapped; and a woman's voice, a voice not unpleasing in quality, cried, in English, “Come in!”
4
She rose, as he pushed open the door, from the chair. She was young—certainly in the twenties—and unexpectedly, curiously beautiful. Her voice was Western American. Her abundant hair wras a vivid yellow. She was clad in a rather elaborate negligee robe that looked odd in the dingy room. Her cot stood by the paper windows, on a square of new white matting. Two suit-cases stood on bricks nearer the kang. And a garment was tacked up across the broken paper squares.
“I'm sorry to trouble you,” she said breathlessly. “But it's getting unbearable. I've waited here ever since yesterday for some word. I know there was trouble. I heard so much shooting. And they made such a racket yelling. They got into the compound here. I had to cover my windows, you see. It was awful. All night I thought they'd murder me. And this morning I slept a little in the chair. And then you came in... I saw you... and I was wild to ask you the news. I thought perhaps you'd help me. I've sat here for hours, trying to keep from disturbing you. I knew you were sleeping.”
She ran on in an ungoverned, oddly intimate way.
“I'm glad to be of what service I—” He found himself saying something or other; wondering with a strangely cold mind what he could possibly do and why on earth she was here. His own long pent-up emotional nature was answering hers with profoundly disturbing force.
“I ought to ask you to sit down,” she was saying. She caught his arm and almost forced him into the chair. She even stroked his shoulder, nervously yet casually. He coldly told himself that he must keep steady, impersonal; it was the unexpectedness of this queer situation, the shock of it...
“It's all right,” said she. “I'll sit on the cot. It's a pig-sty here. But sometimes you can't help these things.... please tell me what dreadful thing has happened!”