Excitedly, at the end of the store, Irene Johns told her story. Dreghorn--in a moment of boredom, Li Sin judged--had dropped in to see the family of the man he had known fifteen years before in Hongkong. He had heard of Mrs. Johns and her daughter from some casual acquaintance. Li Sin smiled; the casual acquaintance had spoken of the daughter's beauty, most probably. Mr. Dreghorn had been so kind to all of them! He had taken them out, had showered presents on them, had in the end asked her to marry him. "Indeed!" Li Sin thought, and he encouraged her to go on. He was so big, so powerful, she hinted. He had done big things, had had great adventures. She seemed a little aghast as she mentioned that. He was so compelling, she said. "She is not in love," thought Li Sin. "She is hypnotized." He was going on one more expedition, she told the Manchu. After that, he was coming home to settle down. They would have a house in the country, a farm. "Agh!" Li Sin exclaimed to himself. So that was it. The old, old story, as old as Cain: the rake, the scoundrel, after sucking the world dry of wickedness, wanted a wife, home, and children. Li Sin could understand how the girl's purity, her lightness, her youth, had appealed to the world-worn rascal. He could understand the visions the man had--the sweet, hawthorn-scented dreams. It was like a murderer seeking to wash the blood from his hands with God's pure water. They left. Li Sin escorted them courteously to the door. "Good-by!" he wished them. "Good-by, my yellow friend," Dreghorn answered contemptuously. Irene Johns did not hear it. Li Sin went above to his apartment. He clapped his hands for Hong Kop. "You will go down to where you know, Hong Kop, to the house of Ling Wah Lee--" The Cantonese made his eternal bow. "And you will have him find out for me, Hong Kop, all there is to be known about Roderick Dreghorn, hunter of ivory, with a bullet-mark on the forehead and a weal on the right hand, the weal of a Burmese knife." There is a doctrine in one of the faiths that man is born in original sin, and that unless he is cleansed by sacrament he is until the end of time the property of the evil one. There is an article of dogma in the same faith that one may become possessed of demons. If this is true, then never a sacrament was said over Dreghorn, nor ever was he confronted with the exorcist's mystic and terrible formula. Hell seemed to have employed him all his life and to have made him its brain and hand. The first of the story was bad enough, with its record of treachery, of gainful crimes in the dark lands, of murders concealed and never explained. Even Li Sin's worldly-wise mind was shocked by Hong Kop's report. There was the incident in the Belgian Congo when Dreghorn, allied with a corrupt Belgian official, burned a village with all the inhabitants, shooting down those who tried to escape from the flames. They had not produced enough ivory.