How long he had lain thus he had no means of judging accurately; but hours—­long, maddening hours—­seemed to have passed since, with the muzzle of Sin Sin Wa’s Mauser pressed coldly to his ear, he had submitted willy-nilly to the adroit manipulations of Mrs. Sin.  At first he had believed, in his confirmed masculine vanity, that it would be a simple matter to extricate himself from the fastenings made by a woman; but when, rolling him sideways, she had drawn back his heels and run the loose end of the line through the loop formed by the lashing of his wrists behind him, he had recognized a Chinese training, and had resigned himself to the inevitable.  The wooden gag was a sore trial, and if it had not broken his spirit it had nearly caused him to break an artery in his impotent fury.

Into the darkened inner chamber Sin Sin Wa had dragged him, and there Kerry had lain ever since, listening to the various sounds of the place, to the coarse voice, often raised in anger, of the Cuban-Jewess, to the crooning tones of the imperturbable Chinaman.  The incessant moaning of the woman on the bed sometimes became mingled with another sound more remote, which Kerry for long failed to identify; but ultimately he concluded it to be occasioned by the tide flowing under the wharf.  The raven was silent, because, imprisoned in his wicker cage, he had been placed in some dark spot below the counter.  Very dimly from time to time a steam siren might be heard upon the river, and once the thudding of a screw-propeller told of the passage of a large vessel along Limehouse Reach.

In the eyes of Mrs. Sin Kerry had read menace, and for all their dark beauty they had reminded him of the eyes of a cornered rat.  Beneath the contemptuous nonchalance which she flaunted he read terror and remorse, and a foreboding of doom—­panic ill repressed, which made her dangerous as any beast at bay.  The attitude of the Chinaman was more puzzling.  He seemed to bear the Chief Inspector no personal animosity, and indeed, in his glittering eye, Kerry had detected a sort of mysterious light of understanding which was almost mirthful, but which bore no relation to Sin Sin Wa’s perpetual smile.  Kerry’s respect for the one-eyed Chinaman had increased rather than diminished upon closer acquaintance.  Underlying his urbanity he failed to trace any symptom of apprehension.  This Sin Sin Wa, accomplice of a murderess self-confessed, evident head of a drug syndicate which had led to the establishment of a Home office inquiry—­this badly “wanted” man, whose last hiding-place, whose keep, was closely invested by the agents of the law, was the same Sin Sin Wa who had smilingly extended his wrists, inviting the manacles, when Kerry had first made his acquaintance under circumstances legally very different.