"Even madness will not explain that!" Li Sin shook his head. There was the incident during the period of the Boxer chaos in Yuen-Lau, when Dreghorn and an associate had tortured an old mandarin, hoping to make him unearth treasure. They had given him the torture of the bowstring, and the water torture, and the torture of red metal at his feet. "And he an old man," Li Sin thought, "four-score and five!" There was the incident in Mombasaland when the fiendish natives had captured a lone hunter of ivory, had crucified him on the ground, smeared with honey for the ants, delirious under the smashing sun. Dreghorn could have rescued him, for he was well armed and had a large party of natives. But he contented himself with stealing the man's ivory and leaving him there to die. "That is one thing for which there is no punishment," Li Sin thought. "No punishment is equal in horror." Li Sin read another incident, and he read no farther. It was the story of Marie Tirlemont, called _Flancs-de-neige_, whom Dreghorn had brought with him from Maxim's in Paris, down to the Congo. She had ceased to amuse Dreghorn a hundred miles south of Leopoldville, and he had abandoned her alone, in a village of black beasts. And now Dreghorn, Li Sin mused, wanted to marry. He wanted to marry this fair little American girl, pure and delicate as the petal of a primrose, light and shimmering and gay as iridescence on water--to make a home with her, to have her bear children. He called for Hong Kop. "What is the profit of crime, Hong Kop?" he asked. The Cantonese thought for a moment. "The profit of crime is death," he answered. "Death is a sweet and gentle thing, Hong Kop," his master mused. "It comes to the old like a gentle and sweet-scented sleep. It comes to the suffering like a grateful anodyne. On others it falls so quickly and surely that there is no pain. It is not the profit of crime, Hong Kop, except for those who wish much to live." He mused again, joining his finger-tips together and knitting his brows. "Unless, instead of being a sweet sleep, it is a nightmare, Hong Kop! Unless, instead of being an anodyne, it is a horror! Unless it comes accompanied by a huge and monstrous fear, a terror that clutches the heartstrings, a fear that kills!" He was going away on the morrow, Dreghorn said. He would be away for six months, and then he would return, and they would be married. He wanted to buy her something before he left, a ring or a bracelet. "But she wanted to buy it here," he sneered at Li Sin. "I wanted to buy it here," she replied warmly, "because here I can get the most beautiful things in the world." "If you care for that yellow junk," Dreghorn laughed shortly. "Roderick!" she protested quickly. She was pained through and through. Li Sin smiled reassuringly at her. But Dreghorn wandered on. "Anything you want," he told Irene; "anything that pleases you."