One day, soon after Daddy was buried, Kip came to my room. I was crying on the bunk, and he stood there watching me; then he placed a roll of gold on the table. “I give you two hundled dollar,” he said. “You likee go away home? No good stay here. Chiny actor heap bad.” I sat up in surprise. I wondered where I would ever find another man who, loving me and having me in his power, would give me the means to escape. Right away I began to like him. “Oh, Moy Kip,” I said, “you have been so good to poor Daddy!” He looked at me hard, and said, “You likee Moy Kip? You mally me, please?” So, after a while, I ended by accepting him, and I have never been sorry since. We were married in the Chinese way. I wore a stiff dress of red silk my husband bought for me, and my hair was braided tight and greased, fastened with gold fila-gree and jade ornaments. I had my cheeks rouged and eyebrows painted, and all. But it was not till the carriage took me from my old rooms and the slave woman had carried me on her back up the stairs and into Moy Kip’s home (so that I should not stumble on the threshold and bring bad luck), that I found out how much difference the marriage was going to make to my husband. For I wasn’t taken to the theatre at all, but to a little set of rooms in Spofford Alley. When he came in to meet me, dressed like a prince in his lilac blouse and green trousers, I asked him how it happened he hadn’t fitted up a room for me in the theatre. Seems like he reckoned I had brought him luck, for he had paid the manager for the right to quit acting, and he was going to try and get into more respectable business. In China, of course, he would have had to go on being an actor, and his sons after him, but Chinatown here is different, and it’s getting to lose some of the old strictness. What Moy Kip was going to do, was to smuggle opium. He’d been wanting to go into it for a long time, but he had nobody to help him at it, nobody he could trust, that is. With me to take hold, he reckoned he could make right smart of money. We bought a naphtha launch and filled it with nets and truck, like we were fishing, if anybody wanted to inspect us; and Kip had fixed the stewards on about every China steamer coming into port. They bought the stuff in five-tael tins, and packed it in bales with lines and floats, dropping it overboard as the ship crossed the bar. Then all we had to do was to cruise around in the launch and pick up the floats and haul in the bale. It was my part of the business to dispose of the opium after we had got it into town. I sold it to a German who distributed it through Chinatown.