“I think you will not refuse,”--he was very urbane, almost gentle of speech--“but if you do refuse, I will promise you that you shall be glad to have that bottle as a place of refuge.” He uttered two words sharply. The doors at the farther end of the apartment opened and four men came in naked to the waist--great muscular coolies with scarcely any humanity in their brutalised faces. “Suppose,” suggested Soo, “suppose, instead of putting you into the bottle and disposing of you as I shall in an especially novel fashion, I find a quicker death for you by handing you to these cattle?” Her hands went to her face. “No, no, no!” she shuddered. At a nod from Soo the men departed. “_Montez!_” said Soo mockingly, and she went up the creaking ladder without hesitation. It said much for the immense size and solidity of the bottle that it did not budge under the strain of her weight. She sat for a moment on the edge of the neck with her feet dangling in the cavity where, in a bottle of ordinary dimensions, the cork would be fixed. “Go on,” said Soo, and glanced at the door. She lowered herself with hands that shook down the swaying rope ladder, and came to rest on a cushion below. She was in the room, but not of it. She saw Soo speaking but did not hear his voice till quite a second later, when it had travelled over the neck of the bottle and down to her. He came across and gave a pull upon the silk ladder and withdrew it flinging it down on the ground, and kicked the bamboo steps away. He spoke again, and his servants removed the only means by which she could escape. She had to attune her ear to her strange position, and after a while, when she had learnt to ignore the movements of his lips and wait for the words to float down to her, she knew as well as though no solid wall of glass was between them. He was sitting cross-legged on a cushion, still smoking his pipe. By and by he knocked the pipe out on to a little porcelain tray and devoted the whole of his attention to her. “You may wonder,” he said, “why I have awakened you at this inconvenient hour to begin a process which is to end your earthly career.” She made no reply. “I do not doubt,” he said, “that you expected sooner or later that your lover would learn of your unhappy plight and come hastening across China like a modern knight-errant to your rescue.” He spread out his hands in deprecation. “Alas,” he mocked, “your lover is not in a position to assist you, and far less is he in a position to assist himself.” “What do you mean?” she was startled into asking, and her voice sounded strange in that confined place. “Alas!” repeated Soo. “He sits in the house of the dead, waiting for death.” She stared at him in horror. He picked up another pipe and lit it from the tiny flame in the smoke-box by his side.