"It does, on the quiet--_very_ quiet! But they're scared to death of being
found out. Besides----"

"Besides--what?"

"Well, ma'am, your husband said when he engaged me he thought it would be
best not to try and get you into any such place. It might hurt your
feelings."

"Oh!" exclaimed Angela. Her "feelings," if not hurt, were in commotion.
"He--he _isn't_ my husband."

Then she wondered if it would not have been better to have kept silence,
and let the man think what he pleased. He would never see or hear of her
again. She laughed to show Nick that she was not embarrassed, and then
hurried on. "I _must_ see them smoking!"

"It would make you feel mighty sad, Mrs. May," said Nick. "I went once,
and--it kind of haunted me. I thought to myself, I'd never take a woman
who had a heart----"

"I haven't a heart," laughed Angela, piqued. "I've only a will.
But--you're my host, so I suppose I shall have to give my will up to
yours."

To her surprise, Nick did not yield. "We'd better begin with the singing
children," he said to Schermerhorn, "and then we won't feel we're keeping
them up late."

The guide led them through Dupont Street, the street of the bazaars, and
another smaller, less noisy street, where fat, long-gowned men, and women
with gold clasps in their glittering edifices of ebony hair, chaffered for
dried abalones, green sugarcane, and Chinese nuts. In basements they could
see through half-open doors at the bottom of ladderlike steps,
earnest-faced men, with long, well-tended queues of hair, busily tonsuring
sleepy clients. Stooping merchants, with wrinkled brown masks like the
soft shells of those nuts which others sold, could be discerned in dim,
tiny offices, poring through huge round spectacles as they wrote with
paint brushes, in volumes apparently made of brown paper. Here and there,
in a badly lit shop with a greenish glass window, an old chemist with the
air of a wizard was measuring out for a blue-coated customer an ounce of
dried lizard flesh, some powdered shark's eggs, or slivered horns of
mountain deer. These things would cure chills and fever; many other
diseases, too, and best of all, win love denied, or frighten away bad
spirits.

By and by they turned out of the street into a dim passage. This led into
another, and so on, until Angela lost count. But at last, when she began
to think they must be threading a maze, they plunged into a little square
court, where a lantern over one dark doo