Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/175

 seeming and its sinister reputation—and he stood some time gazing at it, scrutinizing each closely shuttered window—there was not a balcony; it was unique in that—and the tight-shut door with the apothecary sign hanging from the lintel.

"It looks a peaceful place, innocently asleep after a day of honest industry," he said to himself; and then some old words that were great favorites of his, from a book he never tired of reading, came to his memory, and he bespoke them aloud softly to the star-emblazoned Chinese night: "He it is who ordaineth the night as a garment, and sleep for rest, and ordaineth the day for waking up to life."

But the apothecary's house was not quite asleep. A thin line of light trickled out from below the door, and then the door opened narrowly and a woman, shrouded from crown to shoe in humble blue, came into the street.

He did not see her face, although, as by law obliged, she carried a lantern, but she saw his, clear-cut in the white moonlight, a late, just-rising moon, and for an instant she turned as if to speak to him; but she thought better of it, and walked quietly but quickly away.

Bradley wondered who she was—up to no special harm, he hoped. It did not occur to him that her gait was familiar, at least not individually so—thousands of amahs walk so. But he noticed that her coarse blue clothes looked very clean—as clean and as blue as the blue house of Yat Jung How.

He went home then, and Ah Wong went too, back to the hotel, slipping out of the Chinese quarter stealthily, but going along the Praya unconcernedly and through Queen's Road and Ice House Street, and up the long climb to the Peak, and past the night watchman at the