and drink. Yet he was glad, for this had never happened before. It did not occur to him that this mysterious establishment of their relation was fatal to the real romance. Each minute forged him anew. She was great and glowing. He did not know that all the old ideals of wooing and winning that the world has come up through were impossible with her. Vaguely and darkly the hope formed that time might change something; that the luck of a white man in Asia might come to his aid.

Romney was less the mere crude male than most men. He had intuitions, visions, deep yearnings, answered to very little of the levelling dominance of the trade mind, but on the very points that he excelled, she chose to master him. It was as if he had been provinced in Asia and she had come from all the earth. His thought of her to-day was not the thought of yesterday. It did not dawn upon him that her changes might not be moodiness or incoherence, but the very width of her orbit and splendour of her diffusion.

There was at Longstruth's a Chinese boy who served them. He seemed to enter into their thought of the little delicacies. He had some English which Romney chose to use for a time, but there came a moment of late afternoon when a matter of service required explicit information, and Romney administered it in Chinese, excusing himself as he took his attention for a moment from the woman. He turned back to her to find a new interest in her eyes.

"Tell me about yourself," she said suddenly. "You must have come to China as a child to speak like that."

"No, I have been here only four years—three years in India before that. My ways have not been interesting. Since you came they have all been cheapened. I see I have wasted my time—"

"Now that is a good saying. Thank you. Sometimes, Sir Romney, you are very attractive—"

"It is quite true. The things that interested men here—I mean the Americans and English, the big exploiters—have not held me long, though I have worked with them and for them. Always the different, the more hidden things called me. Until yesterday I thought I was at least doing decently well. But I see you have somehow touched the core of things. I've been puttering—"

"At least, it is good not to be considered either wicked or insane," she answered. "I usually draw that. I wonder that you like my things. Sometimes I have even felt myself that I am a little mad. The first time that came to me was in England the first year after the tiger. It was a summer Sunday morning—the earth was risen in beauty—birds singing as they only sing in the sun-mists that follow a night of rain. It was a seething of bird-song, of colour and fragrance—just a year after the tiger. As I listened, the fury of longing that I live with came upon me in high tide—and then in the midst of it, I heard the sound of church-bells from the village. It was like a gray cloud, an evil odour, a catarrhal voice.... Spectres of the English Sabbath. People stifled me for days after that.... But I talk and talk and I want your story now. See, we have been together all day and some of yesterday and you have listened—"

"I am not through listening. So much of me was asleep before yesterday."

She smiled swiftly at him. "You shall not escape now that you are so good. See, the night is coming. Everything is here. Longstruth's is worth coming up the river for. China is sweeter here and undefiled. I would be hideously lonely without you—and you have not told me who and what you are. Why, listen, I don't often ask a man to talk about himself."

"I get the force of that. It's only that what I have is drab and young. I would have made it different had I known you were coming—"

"Sir Romney—there's a pull about you. You do not diminish. Oh, I must know all about you now—"

"I hear and obey," he said.

3

Romney was a bit taller than necessary with a beaked nose and a head that bowed naturally. When he turned from the side and looked up at you smilingly, it was a face you were apt to remember. The mannerism was so peculiarly his own when he was interested or amused, that he did not know of it. There was nothing about him (unless it was the depth of calmness in his eyes) to denote other than a sophisticated white man travelling in a state of comfort if not plenty. A clean-faced, white-toothed American of twenty-seven—a good mouth, a good brow, straight lean shoulders, and a long dark hand—nothing striking or exceptional, except the beaked nose, and possibly the depth of calmness in his eyes. Something of poise and power in that.

"I came out here seven years ago from California," he said. "A tender-chested young student from Palo Alto with book-Sanscrit. I had a post with an American consul in one of the second towns of Bengal. I used to write letters in Bengali for him. He had a rice-brewery on the side, and couldn't write English. He used to chew tobacco and promote his business, swearing that rice beer was more delectable than English ale, and experimenting in keg-making with the native woods. It hurt him to have to import kegs. The English didn't like him and he had an incessant war on. It kept him fit, this battling. The East could not smother his energy.... But I took other posts and was presently touching the skirts of Mother China.

"She challenged me more than India had done. I really got the call from her one morning on the Pearl River a little above Canton. It was a shimmering day—the big rice-lands on either side. Some rice we saw yesterday, though we're a bit far north. There was a glitter about that day as the sun rose. I seem to remember this now more than then. You always put an atmosphere to your stories—the kind of day or night. Nature means things to you.... I knew right there that day that I had left India for good. That was four years ago. China needed me and I was to spare. All hitherto was mere preparation for a life in the East, more real. You see the English have everything in India. The higher a man climbs the more he feels the ordering English hand. It doesn't make any difference if he likes it or not.

"I was merely carrying a little commercial message up the Pearl River that morning. China touched me, kind of opened up to me then and there, the big deviltry, the big cunning, the big beauty in the world above the dollar sign and the designation of the British pound.

"I remember the saffron legs of my boatman and his sing-song intonation as he hailed some naked neighbour in a passing junk. I began to get the quality of the voices of the Chinese then, as I had heard the native Bengali three years before—a kind of lust in my heart to know what they were saying, and why they said it. I threw up my job and travelled north. I studied long in Shanghai. Long—that is, about two years. Academic Sanscrit didn't help then. I had to get a new neck. I learned the basic Chinese and then began to put on the flourishes of the provinces. I didn't do this with the idea of commanding big money, but I began to make money. You see, I was getting something that only eight or ten Americans have. I wanted more than the language. I wanted the working of the Oriental mind.

"The only clue to that is religion. I had studied a lot with the Hindu boys in Bengal. That's what they do best—study, gather in, mull