Tears now were running down the woman’s fat cheeks, and her voice quivered emotionally.

“For me it is the end, but for her it is the beginning of life.  All right!  I don’t matter a damn!  She is young and beautiful.  Ah, God! so beautiful!  A drunken pig comes here and finds his way in, so I give him the smoke and presently he sleeps, but it makes delay, and I don’t know how soon Kwen Lung, that yellow demon, will wake.  For he is like the bats who sleep all day and wake at night.

“At last the sailor pig sleeps and I call softly to my dear little one that the time has come.  I have gone out into the street, locking the door behind me, to see if her man is waiting, and I hear her shrieks—­her shrieks!  I hurry back.  My hands tremble so much that I can scarcely unlock the door.  At last I enter, and I see and I know—­that yellow devil has learned all and has been playing with us like cat and mouse!  He is lashing her, with a great whip!  Lashing her—­that tiny, sweet flower.  Ah!”

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.”

While I watched him dumfounded he walked across to the woman and touched her on the shoulder.  She raised her tear-stained face.

“All right,” she whispered.  “I am ready.”

“Get ready as soon as you like,” said he tersely.