The cigarette which he had offered her at the club had been drugged.  She was in Limehouse, at the mercy of a man in whose veins ran the blood of ancestors to whom women had been chattels.  Too well she recognized that his passion must have driven him insane, as he must know at what cost he took such liberties with one who could not lightly be so treated.  But these reflections afforded poor consolation.  It was not of the penalties that Lou Chada must suffer for this infringement of Western codes, but of the price that she must pay for her folly, of which Pat was thinking.

There was a nauseating taste upon her palate.  She remembered having noticed it faintly while she was smoking the cigarette; indeed, she had commented upon it at the time.

“The dirty yellow blackguard!” she said aloud, and clenched her hands.

She merely echoed what many a man had said before her.  She wondered at herself, and in doing so but wondered at the mystery of womanhood.

Clarity was returning.  The room no longer swam around her.  She crossed in the direction of a garish curtain, which instinctively she divined to mask a door.  Dragging it aside, she tried the handle, but the door was locked.  A second door she found, and this also proved to be locked.

There was one tall window, also covered by ornate draperies, but it was shuttered, and the shutters had locks.  Another small window she discovered, glazed with amber glass, but set so high in the wall as to be inaccessible.

Dread assailed her, and dropping on to one of the divans, she hid her face in her hands.

“My God!” she whispered.  “My God!  Give me strength—­give me courage.”

For a long time she remained there, listening for any sound which should disperse the silence.  She thought of her husband, of the sweet security of her home, of the things which she had forfeited because of this mad quest of adventure.  And presently a key grated in a lock.

Lady Pat started to her feet with a wild, swift action which must have reminded a beholder of a startled gazelle.  The drapery masking the door which she had first investigated was drawn aside.  A man entered and dropped the curtain behind him.

Exactly what she had expected she could not have defined, but the presence of this perfect stranger was a complete surprise.  The man, who wore embroidered slippers and a sort of long blue robe, stood there regarding her with an expression which, even in her frantic condition, she found to be puzzling.  He had long, untidy gray hair brushed back from his low brow; eyes strangely like the eyes of Lou Chada, except that they were more heavy-lidded; but his skin was as yellow as a guinea, and his gaunt, cleanshaven face was the face of an Oriental.

The slender hands, too, which he held clasped before him, were yellow, and possessed a curiously arresting quality.  Pat imagined them clasped about her white throat, and her very soul seemed to shrink from the man who stood there looking at her with those long, magnetic, inscrutable eyes.