xpedition, laden with
kitchen utensils, coal and food, to the common cooking-place of the rabbit
colony--a queer and dismal set of iron shelves, long and narrow, sticking
out from a wall, and calling itself an oven.

Each door of each tiny room, which housed an individual or a whole family,
had the name of the owner upon it, in Chinese characters, black and
sprawling, on a red label; and at one whose paper name-plate was peeling
off, Angela's companion stopped. "Li Hung Sun; we makee visit," she
announced, and opened the door without knocking.

Angela had seen furniture packing cases as big as that room, and extremely
like it. On one of the wooden walls, above a bunk which took up nearly
half the space, were a rough shelf and a few cheap, Chinese panel pictures
and posters. Beside the bunk, and exactly the same height from the floor
with its ragged strip of old matting was a box, in use as a table, covered
with black oilcloth. On this were grouped some toy chairs and chests, made
of tiny seashells pasted on cardboard; a vase with one flower in it; a
miniature mirror, and some fetish charms and photographs, evidently for
sale. But on the bunk itself lay a thing which made Angela forget all the
surroundings. A thin, stabbing pain shot through her heart, as if it had
been pricked with a needle. She was face to face with tragedy in a form
hardly human; and though her plump little guide was smiling, Angela wished
that she had listened to Nick's advice. For here was something never to be
forgotten, something which would haunt her through years of dark hours,
dreaming or waking. She knew that the thought of this box of a room and
what she now saw in it would come suddenly to darken bright moments, as
the sun is all at once overcast by a black thundercloud; and that in the
midst of some pleasure she would find herself wondering if the idol-like
figure still lived and suffered.

A little bag of bones and yellow skin that once had been a man lay on the
wooden bunk, whose hard surface was softened only by a piece of matting.
From the shrivelled face a pair of eyes looked up; deep-set, utterly
tragic, utterly resigned. The face might have been on earth for sixty or
seventy years perhaps. But the eyes were as old as the world, neither
bright nor dull, yet wise with a terrible wisdom far removed from joy or
sorrow. The shrivelled shell of a body was a mere prison for a soul to
which torture and existence had become inseparable, and