e. One by one the men
designated dropped out of the group about her. Three shuffled off into a
room adjoining the hallway. Two others ran briskly up the stairs. A sixth
Victor directed to stand by the barred door. His chauffeur and another
Chinaman he told off for his personal attendance.

The maid Chou Nu was left to shift for herself, and while Sofia could see
her she did not shift a finger from her pose of terror, flattened to the
wall. When Sofia came back that way, the girl had vanished, however. Nor
was she seen again alive.

Her arms held fast, Sofia was partly led and partly dragged down the hall,
Victor herding the group on past the staircase and into a bare room at the
back of the house, where a solitary lamp burning on a deal table discovered
for all other furnishing broken chairs, coils of tarred rope, a rack of
ponderous oars and boat-hooks, a display of shapeless oilskins and
sou'westers on pegs. The windows were boarded up from sills to lintels,
the air was close and dank with the stale flavour of foul tidal waters.

Here Victor took charge of Sofia, the chauffeur holding the lamp to light
the other Chinaman at his labours with a trap-door in the floor, a slab of
woodwork so massive that, when its iron bolts had been drawn, it needed
every whit of the man's strength to lift and throw it back upon its hinges;
and its crashing fall made all the timbers quake and groan.

Through the square opening thus discovered Sofia saw a ladder of several
slimy steps washed by black, oily waters that sucked and swirled sluggishly
round spiles green with weed and ooze.

Down these steps the Chinaman crept gingerly, but halfway paused with a
cry, then cringed back to the head of the ladder, yellow face blanched,
slant eyes piteous with fear, as he exhibited an end of stout mooring line
whose other end was made fast to a ring bolt in one of the joists.

With a smothered oath Victor snatched the rope's end from the trembling
hand and examined it closely. Even Sofia could see that it had been cleanly
severed by a knife.

Victor's countenance was ablaze as he dropped the rope. Before the tempest
of his wrath the Chinaman bent like a reed, with faint, protesting bleats
and feebly weaving hands.

But in full tide the tirade faltered, Victor seemed to forget his anger or
else to remind himself it was puerile in contrast with the mortal issues
that now confronted him.

He turned to Sofia eyes of cold fire in a wintry coun