“’Nk you, sir.”

“Good-night.”

As the door closed Victor extended a thin, effeminate hand to a casket of ivory, searched with sensitive finger-tips its exquisite tracery until a cunningly hidden spring responded and the lid, splitting in two, sank down into its walls.  In the pocket thus revealed were many pills, apparently hand-moulded, of a grayish-brown substance, putty-soft.

Slowly Victor selected three, placed one after another upon his tongue, and swallowed them.

He shut the casket and sat waiting.

Slowly the keenness of his countenance became blurred, as if the hand of an unseen sculptor were rubbing down its features, doing away the veneer with which Europe had overlaid the primitive Asiatic, which now showed on the surface, in every detail of coarsely modelled nose, oblique eyes of animal cunning, pendulous lips cruel and sensual.

By degrees a faint trace of colour began to flush Victor’s cheeks, a smile modified the set of his mouth, the heavy-lidded eyes lost their lustreless opacity and glimmered with uncanny light.

He breathed deeply, evenly, with an evident relish.  The action of the opium was visibly renewing his powers.  His expression, softening, became terrible with brute tenderness and longing.  Gazing into shadows in which he saw that which he wished ardently to see, he stretched forth his arms, and his lips moved, shaping a name: 

“Sofia!”

As those syllables, freighted with that undying passion which consumed the man, sounded upon the stillness, Victor turned sharply, with a gesture of irritation, looking aside, listening.

Instantaneously the Asiatic disappeared, thrust back into its habitual latency within the prison of European:  Prince Victor was as he had been, as always to the world, cool, composed, and crafty, master, never creature, of his emotions.

A faint buzzing was audible, broken by muffled clicks.

Rising, Victor approached a table in a corner and with a key from his pocket ring unlocked a heavy casket of bronze.  As he raised its cover a small electric bulb illuminated the interior, focussing on the paper-covered face of a mechanical writing device, upon which a pencil with a broad flat lead operated by a metal arm was tracing characters resembling the hieroglyphics of the Chinese.

When the clicking ceased and the pencil was at rest, Victor caught an end of the paper and pulled it forward until a blank surface again occupied the writing-bed.  Upon this with another pencil he inscribed a reply, then closed and relocked the casket.

Back at the table with the lamp, the message just received became crisp black ash on a brazen tray.

From a locked chest Victor produced an inverness and a soft hat of black felt.  Wearing these he moved quietly out of the lamp’s radius of light, and made himself one with the shadows that crowded one another round the walls.  He did not leave by the hall door; but of a sudden the room was untenanted.