There came a blank—then a sharp, stabbing pain in her right arm. She thought it was the knife, and shrieked wildly again and again....
Years seemingly elapsed, years of agony spent amid oblique eyes which floated in space unattached to any visible body, amid reeking fumes and sounds of ceaseless conflict. Once she heard the cry of some bird, and thought it must be the parakeet which eternally sat on a branch of a lonely palm in the heart of the Great Sahara.... Then, one night, when she lay shrinking from the plucking yellow hands which reached out of the darkness:
“Tell me your dream,” boomed a deep, mocking voice; “and I will read its portent!”
She opened her eyes. She lay in the untidy bed in the room which was laden with the fumes of chandu. She stared upward at the low, dirty ceiling.
“Why do you come to me with your stories of desperation?” continued the mocking voice. “You have insisted upon seeing me. I am here.”
Rita managed to move her head so that she could see more of the room.
On a divan at the other end of the place, propped up by a number of garish cushions, Rita beheld Mrs. Sin. The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers. Her face wore an expression of mystic rapture, like that characterizing the features of some Chinese Buddhas....
In the other corner of the divan, contemplating her from under heavy brows, sat Kazmah....
CHAPTER XXXVI.
SAM TÛK MOVES
Chinatown was being watched as Chinatown had never been watched before, even during the most stringent enforcement of the Defence of the Realm Act. K Division was on its mettle, and Scotland Yard had sent to aid Chief Inspector Kerry every man that could be spared to the task. The River Police, too, were aflame with zeal; for every officer in the service whose work lay east of London Bridge had appropriated to himself the stigma implied by the creation of Lord Wrexborough’s commission.