now that the eddy of the crowd had left a little clear
space around him she saw with whom he was talking. It was a small, very
small, shabby, nondescript man--possibly only a boy, so short he seemed.
His back was toward her. His clothes hung upon him with an odd
un-Anglo-Saxon air. He was foreign with a foreignness no country could
explain--Italian, Portuguese, Greek--whatever he was, he was a strange
foil to Harry, so bright and burnished.

The hack was turning. She realized with dismay that it was turning sharp
around that very corner where they stood. Suppose Harry should chance to
glance through its window and see Flora Gilsey sitting trembling within.
The hack wheezed and cramped, and all at once she heard it scrape the
curb. Then she was lost! She looked up brave in her desperation, ready
to meet Harry's eyes. She saw the back of his head. For a moment it
loomed directly above her, then it moved. He was separating from his
companion. With one stride he vanished out of the square frame of the
window, and there remained full fronting her, staring in upon her, the
face of his companion.

Back flashed to her memory the goldsmith's shop--dull hues and odors all
at once--and that wide unwinking stare that had fixed her from the other
side of the counter. The blue-eyed Chinaman! In the glare of white
light, in his terrible clearness and nearness, she knew him instantly.

The hack plunged forward, the face was gone. But she remained nerveless,
powerless to move, frozen in her stupefaction, while her vehicle pursued
its crazy course. It was clattering up Sutter Street toward Kearney,
where at this hour the town was widest awake, and the crowd was a crowd
she knew. At any instant people she knew might be going in and out of
the florists' shops and restaurants, or passing her in carriages. And
what of Flora Gilsey in her morning dress and garden hat, in a
night-hawk of a Telegraph Hill hack, flying through their midst like a
mad woman? They were the least of her fears. She had forgotten them. The
only thing that remained to her was the memory of Harry and the
blue-eyed Chinaman together on the street corner.

She had been given a glimpse of that large scheme that Harry was
carrying forward somewhere out of her sight--such a glimpse as Clara had
given her in the rifling of her room, as Ella had shown in her
hysterical revelation. Again she felt the threat of these ominous signs
of danger, as a lone general at a last stand