She choked in her utterance, and turning to the gilded joss which contained the dead Chinaman she shook her clenched hands at it, and the expression on her face I can never forget. Then:
“As I shriek curses at him, crash goes the window—and I see her husband spring into the room! The tender one had fallen, there at the foot of the joss, and Kwen Lung, his teeth gleaming—like a rat—like a devil—turns to meet him. So he is when her man strike him, once. Just once, here.” She rested her hand upon her heart. “And he falls—and he coughs. He lie still. For him it is finished. That devil heart has ceased to beat. Ah!”
She threw up her hands, and:
“That is all. I tell you no more.”
“One thing more,” said Harley sternly; “the name of the man who killed Kwen Lung?”
At that Ma Lorenzo slowly raised her head and folded her arms across her bosom. There was something one could never forget in the expression of her fat face.
“Not if you burn me alive!” she answered in a low voice. “No one ever knows that—from me.”
She sank on to the divan and buried her face in her hands. Her fat shoulders shook grotesquely; and Harley stood perfectly still staring across at her for fully a minute. I could hear voices in the street outside and the hum of traffic in Limehouse Causeway.
Then my friend did a singular thing. Walking over to the gilded joss he reclosed the opening and not without a great effort pushed the great idol back against the wall.
“There are times, Knox,” he said, staring at me oddly, “when I'm glad that I am not an official agent of the law.”