ion of despair, she lost her senses for a time and like a madwoman
fought, shrieking, biting, kicking, clawing, scratching....

With returning lucidity she found herself, panting and dishevelled, arms
pinned to her sides, struggling on for all that, being hustled by some half
a dozen men across a narrow sidewalk of uneven flagstones.

Simultaneously the shutter of perceptions snapped, photographing
permanently upon the super-sensitized film of conscious memory the glimpsed
vista of a grim, mean street whose repellent uglinesses grinned through the
boding twilight like lineaments of some monstrous mask of evil.

Then she tripped on a low stone step, stumbled, and was half-carried,
half-thrown into a narrow and malodorous hallway.

Between her and the sweet liberty of the rain-washed air a door crashed
like the crack of doom.

XXII

THE SEVEN BRASS HINGES

Into a space perhaps four feet in width from wall to wall and seven deep
from the front door to the foot of a cramped flight of crazy wooden stairs,
some ten people were crowded, Sofia and the maid Chou Nu in a knot of
excited men.

In the saffron glow of an ill-trimmed paraffin lamp smoking in a wall
bracket, desperate faces, yellow and brown and white, consulted one another
with rolling eyeballs and strange tongues clamorous. Sofia heard the broken
rustling of heavy respirations; she saw uncouth gesticulations carve the
shadows; her nostrils were revolted by effluvia of unclean bodies, garments
saturate with opium smoke and curious cookery, breaths sour with alcohol.

Two were busy at the door, under the direction of Prince Victor, setting
stout bars into iron sockets. When they had finished, Victor elbowed them
out of his way and thrust back the slide of a narrow horizontal peephole,
through which he reconnoitred.

The tall, thin body stiffened as he looked, and without turning he flung an
open hand behind him and snapped a demand in Chinese. Somebody slipped a
revolver into his palm. Levelling it he sent a volley crashing through the
peephole. Yells responded, and in the hush that fell upon the final shot a
noise of fugitive feet scraping and stumbling on cobbles. A bullet struck
the door a sounding thump and all but penetrated, raising a bump on the
inner face of its thick oaken panels; and Victor shut the slide and turned
back.

Subservient silence saluted him. He spoke in Chinese, issuing (Sofia
gathered) instructions for the defense of the hous