?" he demanded.

The woman grew serious. Then she showed her rice-like row of teeth as
she laughed.

"That means there 's nothing in it for me," she complained with
pouting-lipped moroseness. Her venality, he began to see, was merely
the instinctive acquisitiveness of the savage, the greed of the petted
child.

"No more than there is for me," Blake acknowledged. She turned and
caught up a heavily flowered mandarin coat of plaited cream and gold.
She was thrusting one arm into it when a figure drifted into the room
from the matting-hung doorway on Blake's left. As she saw this figure
she suddenly flung off the coat and stooped to the tea tray in the
middle of the floor.

Blake saw that the newcomer was a Chinaman. This newcomer, he also
saw, ignored him as though he were a door post, confronting the woman
and assailing her with a quick volley of words, of incomprehensible
words in the native tongue. She answered with the same clutter and
clack of unknown syllables, growing more and more excited as the
dialogue continued. Her thin face darkened and changed, her white arms
gyrated, the fires of anger burned in the baby-like eyes. She seemed
expostulating, arguing, denouncing, and each wordy sally was met by an
equally wordy sally from the Chinaman. She challenged and rebuked with
her passionately pointed finger; she threatened with angry eyes; she
stormed after the newcomer as he passed like a shadow out of the room;
she met him with a renewed storm when he returned a moment later.

The Chinaman now stood watching her, impassive and immobile, as though
he had taken his stand and intended to stick to it. Blake studied him
with calm and patient eyes. That huge-limbed detective in his day had
"pounded" too many Christy Street Chinks to be in any way intimidated
by a queue and a yellow face. He was not disturbed. He was merely
puzzled.

Then the woman turned to the mandarin coat, and caught it up, shook it
out, and for one brief moment stood thoughtfully regarding it. Then
she suddenly turned about on the Chinaman.

Blake, as he stood watching that renewed angry onslaught, paid little
attention to the actual words that she was calling out. But as he
stood there he began to realize that she was not speaking in Chinese,
but in English.

"Do you hear me, white man? Do you hear me?" she cried out, over and
over again. Yet the words seemed foolish, for all the time as she
uttered them, she was facing the