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 “Before I ask you how you got back here,” he said, “I want to say—I don’t get you. Who are you? What’s your position here? A friend of Henry Drew?”

“Decidedly not. I was an employee.”

“Decidedly not? What do you mean by that?”

“If I may speak,” drawled Carlotta Drew. She stared at me between narrowed lids, cold, calculating, hostile. “If I may speak, I think I can throw some light on that. This young man was employed by my husband in the Yunnan mines, and he claimed he had been unfairly treated. There was some cock-and-bull story about a promise”

“There was a promise,” I said; “and it was no cock-and-bull story.”

“He had quarreled violently with my husband, who dismissed him.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I resigned.”

“By chance they occupied the same cabin on the boat coming from China, Rh