“What!”

“Oh, the gash is there all right, partly covered by her hair.”

He stood still, staring at me oddly.

“One meets with cases of singular devotion in unexpected quarters sometimes,” he said.

“You mean that the woman inflicted the wound upon herself in
order------”

“To save old Kwen Lung—­exactly!  It’s marvellous.”

“Good heavens!” I exclaimed.  “And the window?”

“Oh! it was broken right enough—­by two drunken sailormen fighting in the court outside!  Sash and everything smashed to splinters.”

He began irritably to pace the carpet again.

“It must have been a devil of a fight!” he added savagely.

“Meanwhile,” said I, “where is old Kwen Lung hiding?”

“But more particularly,” cried Harley, “where has he hidden the poor victim?  Come along, Knox!  I’m going down there for a final look round.”

“Of course the premises are being watched?”

“Of course—­and also, of course, I shall be the laughing stock of Scotland Yard if nothing results.”

It was close on midnight when once more I found myself in Pennyfields.  Carried away by Harley’s irritable excitement I had quite forgotten the romance of Captain Dan; and when, having exchanged greetings with the detective on duty hard by the house of Kwen Lung, we presently found ourselves in the presence of Ma Lorenzo, I scarcely knew for a moment if I were “Jim” or my proper self.

“Is Kwen Lung in?” asked Harley sternly.

The woman shook her head.

“No,” she replied; “he sometimes stop away a whole week.”

“Does he?” jerked Harley.  “Come in, Knox; we’ll take another look round.”

A moment later I found myself again in the room of the golden joss.  The red curtain had been removed from before the shattered window, but otherwise the place looked exactly as it had looked before.  The atmosphere was much less stale, however, but there was something repellent about the great gilded idol smiling eternally from his pedestal beside the door.

I stared into the leering face, and it was the face of one who knew and who might have said:  “Yes! this and other things equally strange have I beheld in many lands as well as England.  Much I could tell.  Many things grim and terrible, and some few joyous; for behold!  I smile but am silent.”

For a while Harley stared abstractedly at the bloodstains on the pedestal of the joss and upon the floor beneath from which the matting had been pulled back.  Suddenly he turned to Ma Lorenzo: 

“Where have you hidden the body?” he demanded.

Watching her, I thought I saw the woman flinch, but there was enough of the Oriental in her composition to save her from self-betrayal.  She shook her head slowly, watching Harley through half-closed eyes.

“Nobody hab,” she replied.

And I thought for once that her lapse into pidgin had been deliberate and not accidental.