an
long and as black as the night which encompassed it.

Wide, dark eyes stared up across the space into his, and these were set
in a chalky-white face, grim, fearful--startling!

It was Romola Borria. Her white arms were upheld in a gesture of
entreaty. Her lips were moving.

Peter descended a step, and stopped, swaying slightly.

"What--what----" he began.

"He is dead!" came the whisper from the small deck. "I killed him! I
killed him! Do you hear me? I am free! Free! Why do you stare at me
so? I am ready to go. But you must ask me! I will not follow you. I
will not!"

And Peter, clutching with a sick and sinking feeling at the hard rope,
found that his lips and tongue were working, but that no sound other
than a dull muttering issued from his mouth. Momentarily he was
dumb--paralyzed.

"I am not a tool of the Gray Dragon," went on the vehement whisper. "I
am not!"

And to Peter came full realization that Romola Borria was lying, or
endeavoring to trick him, for the last time.

"Go back--there," he managed to stammer at last. "Go back! I won't
have you! I'm through with this damned place."

Painfully he climbed up a few rungs.

Then the voice of Romola, no longer a whisper, but loud, broken,
despairing, came to him for the last time:

"You are leaving me--leaving me--for her--for Eileen!"

Peter made no reply. He continued his laborious climb; first one foot,
then a groping few inches upward along the hard rope with his right
hand, and then the other foot. Nor did he once again look down.

He finally gained the deck. It was blazing with incandescent and
arc-lights. Under-officers and deckhands were pacing about, giving
attention to the loading. Donkey engines hissed, coughed, and rattled,
as the yellow booms creaked out, up and in with their snares of bales
and crates which vanished like swooping birds of prey into the noisy
hatchways.

Peter took in the bustling scene with a long sigh of relief. He still
heard that lonely, anguished voice; the black sampan still rested on
his eyes, heaving on the flood tide upon which the great ship strained,
as if eager to be gone. And out there--out there--beyond the black
heart of mystery and the night, was the clean dawn--the rain-washed
spaces of the shimmering sea.

But he could not look down again. He would not. For a while--or
forever--he had had his fill of China. Before him now lay the freedom
of the open sea, the sunshine o