faint streak of light from
the corridor outside shone under his door. As he noted it, it was joined
by a second streak, forming a triangle.

There was a very soft rasping of metal. Someone was opening the door!

Soames lay back upon the bed. This time he was past further panic and
come to a stage of sickly apathy. He lay, now, because he could not sit
upright, because stark horror had robbed him of physical strength, and
had drained the well of his emotions dry.

Gradually--so that the operation seemed to occupy an interminable time,
the door opened, and in the opening a figure appeared.

The switch clicked, and the room was flooded with electric light.

Ho-Pin stood watching him.

Soames--in his eyes that indescribable expression seen in the eyes of a
bird placed in a cobra's den--met the Chinaman's gaze. This gaze was no
different from that which habitually he directed upon the people of the
catacombs. His yellow face was set in the same mirthless smile, and his
eyebrows were raised interrogatively. For the space of ten seconds, he
stood watching the man on the bed. Then:--

"You wreturn vewry soon, Mr. Soames?" he said, softly.

Soames groaned like a dying man, whispering:

"I was... taken ill--very ill."...

"So you wreturn befowre the time awranged for you?"

His metallic voice was sunk in a soothing hiss. He smiled steadily: he
betrayed no emotion.

"Yes... sir," whispered Soames, his hair clammily adhering to his brow
and beads of perspiration trickling slowly down his nose.

"And when you wreturn, you see and you hear--stwrange things, Mr.
Soames?"

Soames, who was in imminent danger of becoming physically ill, gulped
noisily.

"No, sir," he whispered,--tremulously, "I've been--in here all the
time."

Ho-Pin nodded, slowly and sympathetically, but never removed the
glittering eyes from the face of the man on the bed.

"So you hear nothing, and see nothing?"

The words were spoken even more softly than he had spoken hitherto.

"Nothing," protested Soames. He suddenly began to tremble anew, and his
trembling rattled the bed. "I have been--very ill indeed, sir."

Ho-Pin nodded again slowly, and with deep sympathy.

"Some medicine shall be sent to you, Mr. Soames," he said.

He turned and went out slowly, closing the door behind him.

XX

ABRAHAM LEVINSKY BUTTS IN

At about the time that this conversation was taking place in Ho-Pin's
catacombs, Detective-Inspector Dunbar and D