Back flashed to her memory the goldsmith's shop--dull hues and odors all at once--and that wide unwinking stare that had fixed her from the other side of the counter. The blue-eyed Chinaman! In the glare of white light, in his terrible clearness and nearness, she knew him instantly. The hack plunged forward, the face was gone. But she remained nerveless, powerless to move, frozen in her stupefaction, while her vehicle pursued its crazy course. It was clattering up Sutter Street toward Kearney, where at this hour the town was widest awake, and the crowd was a crowd she knew. At any instant people she knew might be going in and out of the florists' shops and restaurants, or passing her in carriages. And what of Flora Gilsey in her morning dress and garden hat, in a night-hawk of a Telegraph Hill hack, flying through their midst like a mad woman? They were the least of her fears. She had forgotten them. The only thing that remained to her was the memory of Harry and the blue-eyed Chinaman together on the street corner. She had been given a glimpse of that large scheme that Harry was carrying forward somewhere out of her sight--such a glimpse as Clara had given her in the rifling of her room, as Ella had shown in her hysterical revelation. Again she felt the threat of these ominous signs of danger, as a lone general at a last stand with his troops clustered at his back sees in front, and behind, on either side of him, the glitter of bayonets in the bushes. She was in the midst of the tangled traffic of Kearney Street. Swimming lights and crowds were all around her. She peered forth cautiously upon it. She saw a florid face, a woman, she knew casually--and there her eyes fastened, not for the woman's brilliant presence, but for what she saw directly in front of it, thrown into relief upon its background--a short and shabby figure, foreign, equivocal, reticent, the figure of a blue-eyed Chinaman. He was standing still while the crowd flowed past him. This time he was alone. He seemed to be waiting, yet not to watch, as if he had already seen what he was expecting and knew that it must pass his way. It was uncanny, his reappearance, at a second interval of her route, standing as if he had stood there from the first, patient, expectant, motionless. It was worse than uncanny.