e lacquer coffin.

But the adventure was very distasteful. He recollected the smell of the
place, and the memory brought with it a sense of nausea. He thought of
Lala Huang, and his ideas became grotesque and chaotic. Yet the solution
of the mystery lay at last within his grasp, and to the zest of the
investigator everything else became subjugated.

He walked slowly away, silent in his rubber-soled shoes.

IX

THE PICTURE ON THE PAD

Lala Huang lay listening to the vague sounds which disturbed the silence
of the night. Presently her thoughts made her sigh wearily. During the
lifetime of her mother, who had died while Lala was yet a little girl,
life had been different and so much brighter.

She imagined that in the mingled sounds of dock and river which came to
her she could hear the roar of surf upon a golden beach. The stuffy
air of Limehouse took on the hot fragrance of a tropic island, and she
sighed again, but this time rapturously, for in spirit she was a child
once more, lulled by the voice of the great Pacific.

Young as she was, the death of her mother had been a blow from which it
had taken her several years to recover. Then had commenced those
long travels with her father, from port to port, from ocean to ocean,
sometimes settling awhile, but ever moving onward, onward.

He had had her educated after a fashion, and his love for her she did
not doubt. But her mother's blood spoke more strongly than that part of
her which was Chinese, and there was softness and a delicious languor in
her nature which her father did not seem to understand, and of which he
did not appear to approve.

She knew that he was wealthy. She knew that his ways were not straight
ways, although that part of his business to which he had admitted her as
an assistant, and an able one, was legitimate enough, or so it seemed.

Consignments of goods arrived at strange hours of the night at
the establishment in Limehouse, and from this side of her father's
transactions she was barred. The big double doors opening on the little
courtyard would be opened by Ah Fu, and packing cases of varying sizes
be taken in. Sometimes the sounds of these activities would reach her in
her room in a distant part of the house; but only in the morning would
she recognize their significance, when in the warehouse she would
discover that some new and choice pieces had arrived.

She wondered with what object her father accumulated wealth, and hope