Murder Up My Sleeve

2

Terry Clane paused on the sidewalk in front of the building in which the district attorney had his office, ostensibly to light a cigarette.

Standing there, with the flame of the match held in his cupped hands, he took a deep breath, brought the problem of Mandra’s murder to the forefront of his mind, and then, using the methods of concentration he had learned in the Orient, brought his thought to a focal point of white-hot concentration upon that one subject.

The noise of traffic in the street faded in his ears from a roar to a dull muffled sound, then became inaudible. The hurrying forms of pedestrians, the steady stream of motor cars dimmed from his vision, until his eyes saw only the flame of the match and became oblivious of all else.

During the space of time which it took the match to burn to his fingers, Terry Clane concentrated.

Jacob Mandra had been murdered. The district attorney suspected Alma Renton of being somehow implicated in that murder. The crime had been perpetrated with a Chinese sleeve gun, a noiseless weapon. The time of the murder, according to Dixon’s statement, had been fixed at about three o’clock in the morning. The investigation of Clane had been instituted at four-thirty. The crime, then, must have been discovered almost immediately after it had been committed, and the district attorney’s office had promptly concentrated its attention upon Clane. And, since much of the information in the hands of the district attorney could only have been received by cablegram from the consular office in Hong Kong, the investigation must have been vigorously conducted.

Terry had left Alma Renton at some time about one-thirty in the morning. She had then been at her apartment. So far as he knew, she had intended to retire immediately after his departure. If her bed had not been slept in, she must have left her apartment soon after one-thirty, certainly before three o’clock in the morning, the time Mandra had been murdered. The district attorney had very evidently made a determined attempt to question her before questioning Clane. That he had been unable to do so, had been due entirely to his inability to find her. It was, therefore, reasonable to suppose that all her customary haunts had been searched, and searched in vain. Alma’s disappearance was, then, no casual matter. It had been deliberately achieved.

And the district attorney had pressed a button on his desk. Somewhere, that button had actuated a buzzer or bell, two longs and two shorts. Very definitely it was a signal to someone to do something. Yet no one had entered the office in response to that signal. Clane surmised, therefore, that the district attorney had used this means to arrange for some operative to shadow him.

Clane did not make the mistake of looking back over his shoulder, nor did he hesitate unduly. In that brief interval, while he was holding flame to his cigarette, his mind sifted the salient facts from the confusion of minor developments with smooth efficiency.

It was, therefore, not strange that the detectives who followed him, both insisted in their later reports that Terry Clane had not in the least suspected he was being shadowed.

His manner had been that of a citizen going openly about his business, without suspicion — and without guilt. He had paused to light a cigarette. The match had evidently gone out, since he had stood for a second or two holding it in his cupped hands, then had taken another match from his pocket, lit the cigarette, purchased a newspaper, called a taxicab, and been driven directly to his apartment house. Not once had he so much as turned his head to look back. He had left the taxicab standing with the motor running, from which the detectives surmised he had intended to resume his travels.

Five minutes later, an aged Chinese, whom the detectives subsequently ascertained to be Yat T’oy, Clane’s servant, had appeared with a suit of clothes over his arm. He had delivered these clothes to the cab driver, whereupon the detectives had investigated and discovered that Clane, when he had stepped from the cab, had given the driver a bill and told him to wait for a suit of clothes to be delivered to his tailor.

Clane had telephoned Yat Toy from the lobby to bring down the clothes. He, himself, had passed through the lobby to the alley at the back of the apartment house, where his own car had been parked. He had entered his automobile and driven away. It had all been done simply, naturally, and apparently without any ulterior motive.

Such incidents frequently confuse the best of shadows. The district attorney, studying the reports, noted particularly that Clane had not once turned round to look back. Not entirely without some inner misgivings, he absolved Clane of any attempt to shake the shadows from his trail. He was all the more reluctant to announce his decision to his associates, because the memory of his attempt to surprise information from Terry Clane remained in his mind as a coldly dissatisfying morsel. It was not often that the district attorney encountered a witness so bafflingly formal, so completely poised, so thoroughly unsatisfactory.

Clane, in the meantime, drove his car out Bush Street to Gough, turned right on Gough and stopped his car in front of an apartment house. He took the elevator to the top floor, pressed the button of a studio marked “Vera Matthews.”

Though he could hear sounds of surreptitious motion from behind the door, his ring remained unanswered.

Clane tapped on the panels, and heard a faint noise such as might have been made by cautious feet tip-toeing over a carpeted floor.

“It’s Terry, Alma,” he called gently.

The bolt shot back, disclosing an unlined, delicately featured face, carefully groomed hair as lustrously blonde as dried wheat stalks reflecting the sunlight, and startled grey eyes. “How did you know I was here?” Alma Renton asked, flinging the door open, then closing it behind him after he entered.

He didn’t answer her question at once, but, placing his forefinger under her chin, tilted it up so that he could look into her eyes.

“Worrying too hard,” he announced, “which is twice as bad as working too hard.”

She laughed nervously and pushed him away. “Stop it, Terry,” she said. “You make me feel as though you were stripping the clothes from my mind. How did you know I was here?”

“Simple,” he told her, smiling.

“No, it wasn’t simple. No one on earth knew I was here.”

His voice held a note of banter as, making the motions of pulling up his sleeves, he said, “Observe, I have nothing in either hand and nothing up my sleeves. Now then, no later than last week you mentioned that Vera was going on a vacation and that you were going to water the plants in her window boxes. This would indicate Vera had left you a key. Therefore, when I learned that you were not in any of your usual haunts, I surmised...”

“Oh,” she interrupted, “that was it, was it?”

He shook his head mournfully. “Magicians should never give their tricks away,” he proclaimed. “Now, if I had only pretended it was mind-reading, you’d have held me in awe. As it is, I’m just an intruder, and you’ll tell me to get out.”

“The trouble with you, Terry,” she said, “that is, one of the troubles with you, is that you never forget anything. And I strongly suspect your habit of facetiousness is a mask which covers your moves towards a very definite objective.”

“Wrong,” he announced. “Pretending to make moves towards a very definite objective is the mask which covers my facetiousness. What are you doing? Busy?”

She hesitated a moment before saying, “Not unless watering flowers is being busy.” But her eyes involuntarily shifted towards a closed door.

Clane snapped open his cigarette case, extended it to her with an elaborately casual manner. “Where’d you go after I left you last night?” he asked.

“To bed, silly. It was after one o’clock. What do you think I am, a sleepwalker?”

Terry shook his head as she accepted a cigarette. “Your natural temperament, Alma, is that of a rather serious young lady with responsibilities. When you become flippant, it’s a very definite symptom.”

“What do you mean, Terry?”

“Every time you try to conceal something,” he said, “you unconsciously try to change your personality and imitate Cynthia’s happy-go-lucky attitude.”

She frowned thoughtfully. “It’s not deception, Terry, it’s just rebellion at being the balance wheel of the family. Cynthia never bothers to get a serious thought in her head. She’s always getting into scrapes and someone’s always getting her out... What made you think I was trying to conceal some thing, Terry?”

She placed one of his cigarettes between her lips. He struck a match, held the flame to the cigarette. As she leaned forward, every detail of her features illuminated by the flame of the match, Terry said, “The district attorney told me your bed hadn’t been slept in.”

Involuntarily, she jerked backward, then, controlling herself, leaned once more towards the match. She raised her hand to his, the better to guide the flame, and he noticed that the tips of her fingers were cold. “You’re joking, Terry,” she said.

As he gravely shook his head, she added hastily, “I got up early.”

“About five o’clock?” he asked.

Her face flushed indignantly. Before she could speak, he said, “Don’t think I’m unduly curious. I mentioned it because I think that’s when the district attorney’s men investigated. It might be well for you to know — in case you’re questioned.”

She had now recovered from the surprise. Her acting, he decided, if it was acting, was flawless.

“Terry Clane,” she said, her voice showing surprised incredulity, “will you kindly tell me why the district attorney should be interested in where I slept?”

He puffed complacently at his cigarette and said, “He’s a funny chap, the district attorney. Likes to lull you into a false sense of security with a pleasant smile. If he questions you, Alma, remember that an atmosphere of cold, precise formality gets his goat. He’s grown to place so much reliance on that disarming smile of his that when it doesn’t work it leaves him up in the air.”

“He questioned you, Terry?”

“At length.”

“What about?”

“About you and about Mandra.”

“Mandra?”

“Yes, Jacob Mandra. Know him?”

“No, but I’ve heard of him — a bail broker, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Rather mysterious. Some said he was part Chinese, others that he was a gipsy. An interesting character, wealthy, and crooked as a corkscrew. He was murdered early this morning — about three o’clock.”

“Murdered!”

He nodded.

“Did you know him, Terry?”

“I’d met him. He wanted me to get him a sleeve gun. I had one I could have given him, but I thought I’d look him over first. So I ran up and had tea with him.”

“And didn’t give him the sleeve gun?”

He grinned at her and said, “Stay with it, Alma, you’re doing fine. You and the district attorney think of exactly the same questions.”

She walked half-way across the room, to seat herself on the arm of a chair. Her face showed only an expression of puzzled interest, but she seated herself abruptly, as though her quivering knees were glad to be relieved of strain.

“How... how was he killed?” she asked.

“With a sleeve gun,” Terry said, his voice cheerfully unconcerned.

“Terry!”

He waved his hand airily. “Oh, you don’t know the half of it yet, Alma. The district attorney’s ominously mysterious. He’s full of quick questions and dark hints, and... Oh, yes, I nearly forgot the handkerchief.”

“What handkerchief?”

“The one with the initial ‘R’ embroidered in the corner. It has rather a distinctive perfume. The district attorney was quite dramatic about it.”

She kept her eyes averted. “Did you identify it?” she asked, and this time her voice sounded thin and strained.

“Certainly not,” he told her. “There are many elements which enter into the identification of a handkerchief: the size, the material, the mesh, the border, the weave, the...”

“Terry, be serious! Was it my handkerchief?”

“The perfume was similar to that used by your sister.”

“Cynthia wouldn’t know him,” Alma said positively.

Terry looked at the ceiling and said casually: “Weren’t you wearing a smock when I sounded the buzzer?”

“A flower-watering smock, Terry?”

He nodded.

“Don’t be silly.”

“There’s paint on your fingers.”

She stared at her hands.

“Not definite smears,” he told her, “just a faint stain as though you’d wiped your hands with a turpentine rag when you heard my ring.”

Before she realized what he had in mind, he was striding towards the closed door. She flung herself at him, clutching at his arm.

“No! No! Terry,” she screamed. “Don’t. Please don’t! Stop!”

He twisted the knob of the door just as the weight of her body lurched against him. The opening door threw them both off balance. They staggered into the room.

Daylight filtered through a huge window of ground glass, disclosing a large room, the walls hung with canvases. An easel, standing near the centre of the room, supported a canvas across which a black cloth had been drawn so that it was totally covered. A palette lay on a table near a stool. A smock had been thrown over the back of a chair.

Terry, the first to recover his balance, eluded her clutching hand, reached for the black cloth and pulled it to one side.

The canvas was some three feet in length by two and one-half in width. From it, a face stared at them in coldly cynical appraisal.

It was a face which, once seen, could never be forgotten. And the treatment skilfully accentuated its individuality.

Against a subdued background, the head dissolved into shadows. The features emerged Into highlights, to take definite form. The face was swarthy, its expression a strange combination of sneering cynicism and wistful yearning. The nose was long and slightly curved. The mouth was thin and definitely cruel. The eyes dominated the face. They were a silvery-green in color, and they stood out from the sombre canvas with attention-compelling power, as clearly conspicuous as patches of coral water against the shore line of a tropical isle.

Terry Clane appraised the painting with critical eyes.

“A wonderful portrait,” he said. “I thought you told me you didn’t know him.”

She clutched at his arm with one hand; the fingers of her other hand dug into his shoulder. With his eyes still on the painting. Clane said, “It’s a clever bit of treatment, Alma. When did you do it?”

She stared at him with hurt, helpless eyes. “Terry, please,” she pleaded.

“Please what?”

“Please don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t question me about this.”

“So far,” he told her, “I’ve gone to considerable trouble to co-operate with you. And I’m afraid I’ll be put to more trouble to give more co-operation. I don’t want to keep running around in circles in the dark. I might stub my toe.”

She clamped her lips into a tight line of obstinate silence.

“How long have you been here?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“How long have you been here?” he repeated.

She hesitated until the compelling power of his silence dragged an answer from her.

“Since about four o’clock this morning... Oh, Terry, please don’t make me tell you. You can make me tell you. You know it and I know it. You’ve always had that power over me. You can make me do anything. I can’t keep anything from you and never could. Before you went to China... that night...” She choked into silence.

“Why not tell me, Alma, and let me help?” he asked tenderly.

“No. No! You mustn’t! Terry, for God’s sake, keep out of this!”

“But I’ve already been dragged into it, Alma.”

“No, you haven’t. You’ve just been questioned. That doesn’t mean a thing. Promise me that you’ll take a plane and get out of town.”

“That wouldn’t get me out of it, Alma,” he said. “That would get me into it that much deeper. And I’m not going to run away and leave you to fight this thing alone. Now tell me what it is. Come on, let’s have it out. You didn’t kill him, did you?”

“Of course not.”

“Do you know who did?”

“No,” she said swiftly, her tone savage, “of course not... Oh, Terry, I need you so d-d-d-damn much. Why is it I can’t ever have you when I need you most?”

He opened his arms and she clung to him like a child clinging to its mother in the dark.

“Alma,” he said, “stop trembling and talk to me. Tell me what it’s all about, and I’m going to help you.”

She was silent for a few moments while her fingers dug into his shoulders, her cheek pressed against the lapel of his coat. Then she pushed herself free and laughed. There was a little catch in her laugh, but her eyes were defiant.

“No, Terry,” she said, “you’re not going to help me, and that’s final.”

“But I am going to help you.”

“And I say you’re not.”

He drew her to him, and she raised hungry quivering lips to his; then once more freed herself.

He motioned towards the portrait. “Tell me about this, Alma.”

“No.”

“Look here, Alma, are you trying to shield George Levering in this thing?”

“Terry, I’m not going to talk with you. I’m not going to say another word.”

He stared for several seconds moodily at the picture, then said grimly, “All right, Alma. Perhaps it’ll be better that way. But understand this: I’m going to see this thing through, and I’m going to help you. Perhaps it would be better if you didn’t tell me any of the facts. If you did, it might tie my hands. But understand this, Alma, my help is for you, and for you alone. And if you’re trying to shield someone, or trying to shoulder responsibility which rightly belongs to someone else, I’m going to rip the lid off. I’m not going to let you be made the goat. And that goes for Levering, Cynthia, and everyone else!”

He strode through the door from the studio into the living-room, picked up his hat and pulled it firmly into place.

“Terry,” she called sharply, as his fingers closed about the knob of the corridor door. “Oh, Terry, if you only understood. If you only knew...”

“Don’t worry,” he interrupted grimly, “you may not approve of the understanding part, but you’ll have to admit I’ll ferret out the facts. And when I do, whoever’s taking you for a ride had better get out from under.”

He slammed the door, leaving her standing there, watching after him with heart-hungry eyes.

Where San Francisco’s Stockton Street emerges from the north side of the tunnel, it becomes as much a part of China as though it were directly under the domination of the Dragon.

Chinese curio stores, offering rare objects of Oriental art, exhibit smartly dressed show windows for the benefit of tourists. Rubbing elbows with their more pretentious neighbors, are little shops given over to supplying the demands of the Chinese trade. Here can be found rare drugs from the Orient, sliced deer-horn tips for strength and courage, gents’en for the building of blood, if one but refrains from eating any earth-grown vegetable while the blood is building. On the corners are open-air stalls where one may buy Chinese sweetmeats, dried shrimps, and the peculiar, dark brown hemispherical chunks which look like bits of maple sugar but are, in reality, dried abalones.

Behind the spacious display windows of the front streets are crowded domiciles where Chinese huddle together like swarming bees. When a people have lived for crowded generations in cities where space is at a premium, and have learned to be happy in a sardine-like existence, habit naturally gravitates them into close and odoriferous juxtaposition when left to their own devices.

Here are plain doorways which white men will never open, long flights of stairs leading to corridors where numerous doors give an atmosphere of spacious privacy. But these doors all open into common halls where families dwell in a harmonious congestion impossible for the Western mind to comprehend.

Terry Clane opened an unmarked door and climbed two flights of gloomy stairs flanked by banisters on which countless human hands had left a mahogany-like veneer. He walked to the end of a passage and turned the knob of a door which seemed even more shabby and dirty than those of its neighbors. The door swung on noiseless hinges to disclose yet another closed portal. This one, however, was a massive door of carved teakwood.

Terry pressed a button. From the interior came the sounds of a jangling bell. A moment later a Chinese servant, whose face was as seamed and wrinkled as the outer shell of a dried lychee nut, surveyed him with eyes far too self-controlled to give the faintest flicker of expression.

The man stood to one side, and Clane entered a deep-carpeted passage, turned sharply to the left, through a doorway, and stepped round a screen.

Chu Kee was too imbued with Oriental superstitions to occupy any room in which a door was on a straight line with the window, or in which two doors were directly opposite. And, to make assurance doubly sure, he had even gone so far as to place a folding screen just inside the door.

For it is a well-known fact that those unattached and dishonored spirits known as “Homeless Ghosts,” destined to wail through the twilight of after-life, can travel only in straight lines. Such ghosts cannot cross a zigzag bridge, nor can they round the corner of a screen. Moreover, they cannot lift their leaden feet from the floor to climb over a six-inch beam set in a dark corridor.

Chu Kee had a mind sufficiently logical to pay close attention to Occidental arguments illustrating the fallacy of these beliefs; but he was sufficiently steeped in the lore of his race to neglect none of the time-honored precautions.

When Chu Kee saw Terry, he gravely removed the huge, horn-rimmed spectacles which windowed his eyes and, by so doing, paid Terry the implied compliment of setting aside his years, in acknowledgment of the younger man’s wisdom.

Terry clasped his hands in front of him, shook them gently in the Chinese manner of greeting.

“As sunshine warms the dying leaves of autumn, so you have given new life to my heart,” said Chu Kee in Cantonese.

Terry answered in the same language. “It is I who have come to bask in the sunlight of your great wisdom.”

Chu Kee gravely indicated the seat which was reserved for the most honored guest. Had Terry conformed to strict Chinese etiquette, regardless of the urgency of his visit, he would have taken time to protest that he was unworthy of such a chair and made a pretence of seating himself in some other, allowing his host the opportunity to make many flattering speeches. But Terry had no time to waste with the intricacies of Chinese etiquette, and so, lest his failure to do so should seem curt, he served tactful notice upon his host by switching to the English language, which enabled him to come at once to the object of his visit without giving offence.

“Where’s Sou Ha?” he asked.

Chu Kee tapped a gong. A carved panel slid back in the wall. The wrinkled face of a servant regarded him impassively. Chu Kee breathed the name of his daughter. The panel slid shut. A few moments later, a door opened.

The name of a Chinese daughter represents that which the daughter stands for in the mind of her father. Sou Ha, as nearly as the language of the white man can give it meaning, signifies “Embroidered Halo.”

Terry got to his feet as she entered the room, delicate as a flower petal, as freshly tonic as dawn in the mountains. Her eyes, black as wet obsidian, regarded him appraisingly. The lips which smiled at him had been daringly emphasized with lipstick. The long tapering fingers touched his hand in greeting. “Why the official summons? I was only delaying to make myself beautiful.”

“Lily-gilder!” he accused. “Painter of roses, would you add to perfection?”

She laughed, and the sound of her laughter was like the tinkling of strips of glass dangling from a Chinese wind lantern.

Without using a word, by the simple dignity of a gesture, Chu Kee asserted the prerogative of his years and dominated the conversation. This moon-faced Chinese, who could blandly mask his thoughts beneath a suave coating of Oriental evasion, could also gear himself to the life of an Occidental business world. His hand, with its long, fat fingers, the nails encased in golden sheaths studded with bits of jade, gestured to chairs. When they were seated, he said to Terry: “Speak, my son.”

Picking up his spectacles from the desk, he adjusted them to his eyes, thereby signifying that he too had put aside the niceties of Chinese etiquette.

“You knew Jacob Mandra?” Clane asked.

Embroidered Halo stiffened in her chair for a moment, but as Clane’s eyes turned to her, she showed only that courteous interest which one must give a guest, while she waited, as becomes a dutiful daughter, for her father to be the first to speak.

“He is a bail-bond broker,” Chu Kee said in an English which had no accent, yet held just the faint suggestion of hissing sibilants.

“I knew him,” Sou Ha remarked tonelessly.

“What about him?” Chu Kee asked. “Are you, my son, in the power of this one? I have heard that he is evil.”

Terry Clane had spoken of Jacob Mandra in the past tense. The papers had, as yet, said nothing about his death. And Sou Ha herself had used the same tense.

It was as though she realized the trend of his thoughts. “Is he dead, then?” she asked.

“I didn’t say so.”

“But you asked if we knew him.”

Terry nodded and said nothing.

Chu Kee’s face, as benignly bland as a June moon, was turned politely towards Clane, and Terry knew that, were the Chinese to sit there for hours, his expression would not change by so much as a line. But Sou Ha’s eyes were narrowed. Watching her from the corner of his eye, Clane thought her nostrils were slightly dilated.

Terry strove to make his voice highly impersonal. “When I last saw you,” he said to Chu Kee, “you mentioned that an increasing amount of opium was finding its way into Chinatown; that no longer were only the very aged men wooing the poppy, but the young men were being taught to embrace a vice towards which they had an hereditary weakness.”

Sou Ha said quickly, “That’s right, Father. You remember you told Terry that you thought some white man was at the bottom of the thing, and that when his identity was learned our people would deal with him in their own way.”

The calmly courteous lines of the placid face remained serenely untroubled as Chu Kee shifted his eyes to his daughter. But in that shifting glance there was a parental rebuke too subtle for the eye of the ordinary Occidental, yet as deadly in its significance as though it had been a blow. He switched back to the Chinese language.

“One of the compensations of life, my daughter,” he said smoothly, “is that when the eye of the parent becomes dim and his memory uncertain, he may have dutiful children to lend him the sharp vision of youth and the quickness of perception which is the property only of the very young.”

Terry Clane knew better than to turn his eyes towards Sou Ha by even the fraction of an inch. So far as any external evidence was concerned, he saw nothing significant in the remarks of Chu Kee. Pretending to look straight ahead, with all his attention nevertheless focused upon what he could see from the corner of his eye, he observed Sou Ha stiffen into rigid immobility.

“Did you,” Clane asked, “ever locate the white man who was behind this opium ring?”

In the pause which followed, the Chinese girl was as a delicate statue carved from old ivory. Terry Clane knew that she would not speak again until given permission to do so.

Chu Kee managed to convey surprise without raising his eyebrows or appreciably changing the tone of his voice.

“You mean that this man was Jacob Mandra?” he asked.

“I didn’t say that.”

“If you have any information about the head of the poppy ring, I trust the bonds of friendship between us will loosen your tongue,” Chu Kee observed, speaking once more in Chinese.

Clane said slowly, “I have no information. I merely asked a question.”

“No information whatever?” Chu Kee inquired, and, while his tone was casually courteous, Clane sensed that the answer might somehow be momentous.

“I have no information.”

Chu Kee didn’t move, but Sou Ha almost imperceptibly settled herself in her chair. It was as though she had expelled a breath she had been holding.

Terry Clane, knowing then that despite the friendship which existed between Chu Kee and himself, the Chinese had thrown up a barrier between them in this matter, and that he would never get any information save such as he might surprise from them, turned his eyes deliberately to Sou Ha.

“Did you,” he asked, “know anything about this man?”

Under the steady impact of his gaze she became perfectly wooden. The animation faded from her eyes. Her face was a mask. It was as though she had switched off all her animation and left him only a lifeless exterior upon which to gaze.

Terry got to his feet, bowed.

“If it will set your mind at rest,” he said significantly to Chu Kee, “there is, so far as I know, no evidence connecting Jacob Mandra in any way with anything Chinese, other than the fact that some young and beautiful Chinese woman is said to have called upon him shortly before his death; and that he was killed by a Chinese weapon.”

“The wise person,” Chu Kee replied, “always seeks to keep his mind at rest. It is a saying of our race that the biggest ships can sail only upon the placid rivers... And will you not stay for tea and melon seeds? I have been remiss in my hospitality. More and more, as I live in this Western world, I find my sense of values becoming warped. I sometimes forget that the personal contacts in life are of greater value than the things which are accomplished through those contacts.”

Terry Clane shook his clasped hands in grateful refusal of the invitation.

“Time races onward,” he said, “and I must keep pace with the sun.”

Chu Kee arose. Solemnly, he removed his glasses. Terry Clane bowed once more and backed through the door of the room. It was as he turned to face the teakwood door which led to the shabby corridor, that he heard the rustle of silks behind him and turned to encounter Sou Ha’s glittering eyes.

He noted the half-parted redness of her lips, the spots of delicate color which appeared beneath the smooth skin like the waxen texture of a rose petal.

Her hand reached for his arm; the long tapering fingers rested lightly on the sleeve of his coat.

“Tell me,” she asked, “do you, then, love her so much?”

“Who?” Terry inquired, his voice showing genuine surprise.

“The Paint Lady,” she said.

Terry’s quick interest showed in his voice. “What do you know of her?” he asked.

She stood as though he had struck her. Slowly her lips closed, her face became utterly inanimate.

“Please don’t misunderstand me, Embroidered Halo,” he pleaded.

She said nothing, but held unseeing eyes focused steadily upon his face.

He bent to kiss her forehead, and might as well have kissed a wooden image.

She was still standing there as he opened the door and slipped into the shabby corridor with its myriad smells.