others, do you suppose it would have
mattered to me? But you respect her--you respect...." Her voice died
away to an almost inaudible whisper: "I don't believe you. You are
telling me lies. But you have always told me lies; one more does not
matter, I suppose.... How strong you are. You have hurt my wrists. You
will smoke with me now?"

She ceased speaking abruptly, and abruptly resumed again:

"And I do as you wish--I do as you wish. How can I keep her from it
except by making the price so high that she cannot afford to buy it? I
tell you I do it. I bargain for the pink and white boy, Quentin, because
I want her to be indebted to him--because I want her to be so sorry for
him that she lets him take her away from you! Why should you respect
her--"

Silence fell upon the drugged speaker. Sin Sin Wa could be heard
crooning softly about the Yellow River and the mountain gods who sent it
sweeping down through the valleys where the opium-poppy grows.

"Go, Juan," hissed Mrs. Sin. "I say--go!"

Her voice changed eerily to a deep, mocking bass; and Rita Irvin lying,
a pallid wraith of her once lovely self, upon the untidy bed, stirred
slightly--her lashes quivering. Her eyes opened and stared straightly
upward at the low, dirty ceiling, horror growing in their shadowy
depths.

CHAPTER XXXV. BEYOND THE VEIL

Rita Irvin's awakening was no awakening in the usually accepted sense of
the word; it did not even represent a lifting of the veil which cut
her off from the world, but no more than a momentary perception of the
existence of such a veil and of the existence of something behind it.
Upon the veil, in grey smoke, the name "Kazmah" was written in moving
characters. Beyond the veil, dimly divined, was life.

As of old the victims of the Inquisition, waking or dreaming, beheld
ever before them the instrument of their torture, so before this woman's
racked and half-numbed mind panoramically passed, an endless pageant,
the incidents of the night which had cut her off from living men
and women. She tottered on the border-line which divides sanity from
madness. She was learning what Sir Lucien had meant when, once, long
long ago, in some remote time when she was young and happy and had
belonged to a living world, he had said "a day is sure to come." It
had come, that "day." It had dawned when she had torn the veil before
Kazmah--and that veil had enveloped her ever since. All that had
preceded the fatal act was blotted