its, her arm within
his, her smile happy and apparently genuine.

"We must wait until midnight," she informed him. "He will be asleep;
the servants will have retired."

Peter suggested a rickshaw ride through the Chinese city to while away
the hours in between, but the girl demurred, and amended the suggestion
to a street-car ride to Causeway Bay. He consented, and they caught a
car in front of the hotel, and climbed to seats on the roof.

He felt gay, excited by the thrill of their impending danger. She was
moody. In the bright moonlight on the crystal beach at Causeway Bay he
tried to make her dance with him. But she pushed his arms away, and
Peter, suddenly feeling the weight of some dark influence, he knew not
what, fell silent, and they rode back to the base of the peak road
having very little to say.

At a few minutes past midnight they alighted from sedan chairs in the
hairpin trail beside the incline railway station at the peak, and as
they faced each other, the moon, white and gaunt, slipped from sight
behind a billowing black cloud, and the heavens were black and the
night was dark around them.

She took his arm, leading him past the murky walls of the old fort, and
on up and up the sloping, rocky road, dimly revealed at intervals by
points of mysterious light.

They came at length to a high, black hedge, and, groping cautiously
along this for a number of yards, found a ragged cleft. He held the
branches aside while she climbed through with a faint rustle of silken
underskirts. He followed after.

By the dim, ghostly glow of the clouds behind which the moon was
floating he made out ominous shapes, scrawny trees and low, stunted
bushes.

Hand in hand, with his heart beating very loudly and his breath burning
dry in his throat, they approached the desolate, gloomy house--her home!

A low veranda, perhaps a sun-parlor, extended along the wing, and
toward this slight elevation the girl stealthily led him, without so
much as the cracking of a dry twig underfoot, peering from left to
right for indications that their visit was betrayed.

But the house was still, and large and gloomy, and as silent as the
halls of death.

They climbed upon the low veranda. The girl ran her fingers along the
French window which gave upon the hedged enclosure, and drew back upon
greased hinges the window, slowly, inch by inch, until it yawned, wide
open.

He followed her into a room, dark as black velvet, weighte