Early the next morning, Julie received a note from Father Hull, in which he informed her that her appointment to the Manila Department had been arranged. Only one vacancy had existed—in the Tondo district, a native section of the city. The Reredos, the prosperous mestizos who were to accommodate her, had a large house within easy distance of the school.

Isabel made a wry face over this prospect, and advised Julie to remain with her as long as possible. Julie had agreed to remain for the Carnival, but decided that she must go at once to investigate her new surroundings, and that she must establish herself there the following day.

Her salary, she learned, had not been increased, although this prospect had been held out to the teachers for the beginning of their second year of service. For a city like this, where high salaried officials set the standard of Americanism, her stipend was stupendously inadequate. Her financial affairs were in about the same unsatisfactory state as when they had caused the dÉnouement in Nahal. She had always to cripple herself by payments to Mrs. Morris, and there was now Delphine.

Isabel, however, entered into her perplexities to some purpose. She knew, she said, of a Spanish lawyer who wished to come abreast of the times by learning English. As Julie’s school hours were from eight in the morning to one o’clock, she would have her afternoon free to instruct SeÑor Sansillo, who was sure to pay well. He was, Isabel said, a pure-blooded Spaniard of culture, married to an enormously rich mestiza.

Julie set out after breakfast to examine the niche that had been made for her in the city.

Tondo, at the other side of Manila, was very ancient and wholly native. It was as flat and sun-bleached as a desert, and had for its horizon on one side the sea, prognosticative of typhoons; on the other a wall of high hills where the winds blew against heaven. On beyond was holy Arayat, lifting its solitary head into space, and holding, it was said, the Ark buried in its crypt forever beyond the reach of man. The people of Tondo lived in the very frankness, of being. Up beyond the ridges were savages who had once been a serious menace to this part of the city, which lay outside the Christian walls. Julie came to believe that the soul of this section lay likewise beyond those Christian borders.

There was a green somnolent river crawling like a senile old serpent through the District. People swarmed its muddy banks, fishing in it, washing their bodies and their raiment in it, and scooping its awful water into drinking jars. So universal was its utility, it might have been the River of Life itself. Old stone bridges lent an undeserved dignity to the vile, green thing, which, set as it was into the core of the people’s life, was bound to have its grain of the picturesque.

A few of the streets were broad and long, but packed with shops of tarnished brilliancy of color that looked like pigeon holes and illustrated all vocations from Abraham’s time down to the present. These booths made the streets look like dingy fragments of some old rainbow discarded out of the skies. From the robin’s egg blue regions of an “Esquela de Baile,” the abandoned notes of a Zingarella tinkled forth in defiance of the feverish heat of the day, as if its incantation would set the whole street to dancing like tarantulas.

The “Booth of Miraculous Refreshment” was yellow and blue, with orange colored festoons, and before its dilapidated wooden tables its patrons imbibed its elixir without any special demonstration of exhilarance. In the “Peaceful Barberia” two natives were matching a pair of ferocious cocks. The “Patriotic Clam” offered ice-cream as the medium of its contact with the public. Next to the “Bar of the Orient,” in suggestive proximity, was the “Resigned Funeria,” done in apple-green and having on exhibition hosts of pink satin coffins drowned in lace.

However ignominiously born, the native gets even with the universe by going splendidly to his grave.

Beyond the row of Chinese rice shops, infants’ baptismal robes in waves of purple and cerise ruffles smote the eye. The tiny, vivid gala company of elfin shells suggested the shapes of an unborn race about to enter the colorful, enigmatic destiny of the East.

One street was marvelous in the energy and variety of its human service. In a single square one could have one’s teeth pulled by an experienced Japanese, one’s voice trained, through heaven knows what agency of the East; one’s toe nails pared, or one’s self completely mesmerized by a thrillingly bearded Hindoo, whose placarded likeness gave forth sparks in every direction and guaranteed, in large print to all patrons absolute irresistibility in love.

Agipito, from environs of violently stained glass, announced a “brokerage,” and advertised pearls from the Sulu. The riches of the East passed across this pawn broker’s palms. Perfecto Abbas was a lawyer. Access to his conference room was gained through a small swinging door, such as is characteristic of places of alcoholic refreshment, and which possibly was here employed to stimulate trade. Zee Woo, a lavendero of the first class with his mouth as a sprinkler, was to be seen blowing water over the clothes he was ironing. There were Chinamen everywhere, like djinn in goblin depths, fingering abacuses, as if searching for the mystic equation of wealth.

The Street! The Street! Bartering and bargaining, following its oriental, alien and inconjecturable way. Birth is accidental, death inevitable, but the exchange of things that are mine and the things that are thine will go on to eternity.

The native of the East takes his entrance into the universe philosophically. He attaches to himself no importance and definitely expects little, except death. He has even a graceful way of meeting that. The native of the West refuses to allude to this common human casualty, of which he has a horror. The Filipino, on the other hand, nonchalantly displays and even takes pleasure in his colorful coffins, and when the time comes acquiescently sinks into them; for he knows that he is a poor creature with little to cling to, and he is humbly grateful for his day in the sun.

His intransitoriness of soul extends throughout his whole existence. He erects houses that the winds of the sea sweep away; he stores no treasure on earth; he lives from day to day. To-morrow is so inconceivable a mystery that he relegates to it everything that he cannot comfortably compass to-day. By to-morrow he may have dropped gracefully, unresistingly out of the problems of the world. As a race he appears to cherish no ambition of permanency on the globe. Idling in his shops, he wonderingly watches the gnarled Chinese water-carrier go by, bowed under his load. It does not occur to him that the Chinaman bites the dust, that his sons and his sons’ sons may survive.

It was into this existence that Julie was coming to dwell.

The long street thinned out, fields intervened. Finally Julie saw a house sitting back isolated among a great deal of foliage near a bridge. It was of the old Spanish type and had once, probably, harbored fine foreigners. All but buried under the great palms, it looked remote, shaded, and cool after the dust of the sun-swept street. She got out of her carromata, and finding the iron gate in the stone wall that surrounded the estate open, walked in. The rhythmic click of wooden slippers across a stone floor and the soft drip of water caught Julie’s ear.

A muchacho appeared in response to her knocks and led her upstairs to a sala furnished with a piano, a marble-topped table, a heterogeneous array of conch shells, and some startling looking portraits of persons of extraordinarily blended race. SeÑora Reredo entered the room, a tall woman with a slight stoop and a passive gentleness of face. She was in native costume, all black. Genteel native women are almost always dressed in mourning. She led Julie to a large airy room, well furnished and over-looking the garden. She mentioned a sum which, while not extravagant, was not completely gratifying.

When they returned to the sala the children came trooping in, quietly sparkling little folk in European clothes. The SeÑora said that next year they would sell the old house which she had inherited and go back to Spain where the children could be educated. Her husband had an apothecary business, which he would sell out.

The SeÑora said that she was going back to the land of her father’s people. His blood had sojourned afar long enough. Julie glanced up at the human array on the wall, and wondered.

A shriek burst from the children, and simultaneously an energetic, purposeful, round pink pig with an uplifted curl of a tail burst into the room. He was looking for the children who had deserted him. He clearly knew his way about, for he at once dashed behind the piano where the youngest had hidden away from him, and gave forth squeals of joyful discovery. The SeÑora ordered the children to take the beast out. He went in the utmost rebellion.

Julie did not say anything about Delphine. She was distressfully at sea concerning him. Isabel had offered to keep him, but for some not clearly defined reason, Julie did not wish to leave him with her. She left the SeÑora with his problem still unsolved.

Returning, she found Isabel in a disguise of costume so splendid it thrilled one like a poem. She had a tower of jewels on her head. Her body was incased in a kind of closely clinging filagree of shining armor studded with great gems—which, however, left considerable of the concrete, natural Isabel exposed. Her blue eyes sparkled like the great head jewels of a goddess. She looked as if she had been looted from some temple. Nobody, Julie decided, would be able to entertain a pretension alongside her. Her own Pleiad mistiness seemed to dissolve before this glory.

Yet Isabel came over to her and, flicking Julie’s neck with the end of her nail, exclaimed: “That white, white skin—fit for the mantle of an archangel to come down to earth in! And that white fire back of you! Have you an appointment with the millennium of the soul of man that you can contrive to look like that? Take me along, Julie—take me along!”

Isabel was obliged to leave early, but she had provided an escort for Julie; no less a person than Governor Shell of the Mohammedan Group. Julie had heard a lot about this strange, dark hermit of a man, and wondered how he came to be attending such a function; but Isabel explained that he was visiting the Governor-General, and couldn’t very well help himself.

“I don’t believe he wanted to take me,” Julie demurred. “He is said to dislike women.”

“Perhaps he didn’t,” Isabel declared, unabashed; “but when I told him about your exile on an island not far from his own, his missionary instinct was touched. You couldn’t go with any one more distinguished.”

When Governor Shell entered the room, Julie felt at once the force of his somber, reticent personality. She observed that he did not look very young, and that he had a strained sweated look as if he were pushing himself always just beyond the margin of what a man might reasonably do. It was a dark world in which he worked, in the hope of stumbling on the formula that would transform the preternaturally vicious psychologies of the Moros.

In their common experience of the far Southern Islands they found a great deal to talk about. When they reached the Governor General’s mansion, the balconies were glittering with lights festooned like fireflies against the darkness. The Palace sat in huge grounds, one side of which touched the street MalacaÑang, while the other dropped down to the Pasig, along which the gala boats were to appear.

Everybody was crowded onto the galleries in whimsies of costumes. Seats had been reserved for Governor Shell, and he and Julie sat down near the judges of the carnival. Almost all of these people were prominent personages, unknown to Julie; so the Governor explained them to her.

The tall lady in the handsome native costume and the rope of pearls was the wife of the Governor-General. Julie admired her graceful dignity. Colonel Messenger, the man next to her, was one of the biggest Americans in Manila; he had straightened out the land problem, which the religious orders had engendered.

“He and his family are what you might call typical colonists,” the Governor said. “They have settled down on the soil. That young man at his side is his eldest son—Chad.”

“He scarcely seems as large a structure as his father,” Julie commented, “—but what a fury of dreaming he has in his face! Isn’t he the one Isabel told me of—who married a mestiza in order to serve the East, and who believes we are in the process of remaking it?”

The Governor nodded. “He’s a great friend of Barry’s.”

Julie seized the opportunity to ask the question that had been for days on her lips, but which she had somehow refrained from putting to Isabel.

“Is he back?”

“Yes. He got in on the Rohilla Maru yesterday. Brought a Chinaman with him—a Sun Yat Sen Something, I think the name was. He likes to show them what’s going on here—and he’s the one to do it. He has not only had the experience, but he has the intuition which makes him understand the life of the East. He has had a great deal more than most people imagine, to do with the formation of the first representative government over here. He and Caples make a strong team.”

Governor Shell pointed out a tubby, deeply tanned, and patriarchally bearded little man; and Julie remembered his name as that of the head of the Commission and a well known scientist.

“Barry hasn’t the training of Caples, and Caples hasn’t Barry’s faith. Caples is ironic, and believes the Americans are going to get tired, as they usually do, and quit, leaving the worst tangle the East ever saw. Science and acute deductions take the faith out of a man, and faith, I believe,” the Governor said hesitatingly, “is one of the great natural forces. It enables Barry to convince a native quicker than any other white man in the East can do it.”

The Governor took out his watch, as if he were in the habit of living by it. “Not a float so far!” he complained. “That’s always the way—you wait and wait!”

“And the Moros never keep you waiting a minute?”

He smiled. “You mustn’t think I’m not enjoying myself! Nobody ever heard me talk so much in my life.”

Julie who had been studying the face of the man who had married the Eurasian—to save the East, demanded:

“What does Chad Messenger believe?”

“That things are very bad on the earth and need what he calls a Great Change. He talks a lot about it.”

“He looks,” Julie reflected, “as if he had great expectations. What do you think he expects?”

“Oh, some sort of metamorphosis in which the earth will break out of its grub’s existence into a winged thing. Wars—perhaps a lot of them, plagues or earthquakes or even a big war which, like Noah’s flood, would wipe out part of the world and start the rest all over again.”

“It sounds apocalyptical.”

“He and Barry have a lot of these East Indian mystics for friends, and they have a grand prophetical time together. I say the future is a disease with them,” the Governor grumbled.

Two men were entering the select group of judges. The more noticeable of the two was tall and of that consumptive leanness frequent among the scholarly type of Oriental. His pale yellow face was indicative of a Mongolian infusion of blood—a face full of arresting attributes which were yet unaccountably screened to the Occidental eye.

“Pablo Orcullu!” Shell remarked. “Recognized leader of the Filipino people. Some think him very strong—but notice that stoop in the shoulders, the scholars’ stoop! That’s Pablo’s kismet. He may scheme ever so splendidly, but when his moment comes that will hold him back. His kind haven’t learned to think largely and act largely simultaneously.

“Orcullu,” he added, “admires Barry. He owned a big dead old city down South, and he sent for Barry to come down and help him build it over in fine new cement. He says Barry is the biggest white man in the East.

“The sad little fat fellow? De Cadegas. They said in Europe, where he studied, that he had one of the finest voices in the world. But there was the Tobacco Factory which spelled the universe in dollars to his parents; so the nightingale of the East counts tobacco leaves.”

The first float now emerged into view upon the river, through fantastically light foliage. It brought the Governor to his feet with an exclamation. Crimson silken sails, like the enormous petals of a flower outspread to the night, glided beneath them. In the boat stood a conclave of Moro chieftains in their vivid costumes of coral red, tight velvet trousers and jackets buttoned with gold coins, with turbans and gorgeous serongs, and brightly cruel spears and curved swords.

Julie gave a little cry as she recognized one of the figures—Dicky-Dicky, the dwarf of Isabel’s household, in the glittering regalia of a rajah, his small person redolent with princely dignity.

“That scrap of a man was actually a Rajah once!” Governor Shell leaned down to inform her. “It lasted only a few months, unfortunately for history, for I hear he made a wise and progressive ruler. The real Rajah, Bulai, was, by a queer chance, also a dwarf, and in appearance very nearly the twin of the captured Visayan slave. Bulai was a timid prince, afraid of his responsibilities; so between the two mannikins it was cooked up that Dicky-Dicky should impersonate the Rajah.

“The tribe, however, found it out, and it was from a particularly undesirable end that Dicky-Dicky was saved, through the medium of a vast amount of gold, by our friend Isabel, who happened to be visiting somewhere thereabouts.”

“And so poor Dicky-Dicky will never reign again!”

“Oh, I don’t know. He may break out again. He may have his kingdom reËstablished by the government that Isabel plans.”

Up the river now was coming a caricature of the Archipelago. Queen Philippinitis in crown and robe with unstockinged feet and flapping slippers cocked shockingly up before her, and smoking a dreadful cigar a yard long. Under her arm she hugged a huge bespurred cock. She was politely ignored by the official party, but was everywhere else hailed with vociferous appreciation.

Then came the float that Julie had been waiting for—Isabel’s marble barge, carved and tinted with indigo, lit from stem to stern, and crowded with Asiatic figures, from the steppes of the Tartar to the borders of the Kurd. In the center of these human arabesques sat Isabel enshrined. She had wonderfully contrived it all, and there could be no doubt about the preËminence of the float.

Then quite suddenly the attention of the beholders was drawn to a tall brown man who stood on top of the barge with a long propelling pole in his hand. In the striking suggestion of his posture and the occasional glimpses of his brown uplifted features, he managed to convey a significance that transcended the glory below. There below reposed the ancient, static, and unstable magnificence of the East; but above—alert, upright, asking its question of the future and the judgment of white men—was the Man-Soul of Asia. The boat drifted off into the shadows, but that brown image remained, graven on the brains of those who saw it.

“That was Barry!” Julie said half under her breath. She stared around at this strange galaxy of people, whose background of the East gave them a touch of fantasy. These days of the Empire, or creation—when a fragment of the East was shaking under a stupendous renovation! And back of it, these dauntless men and women who were stirringly pledged to the resurrection! A new world must take shape under their will, a world of the best ideals.

There was an exhilaration in the air, an elixir working upon an ancient life. An intoxication came over Julie as she watched and listened to the music. The faces melted into a phantasmagoria, a marching host dedicated to the East and sweeping on to shape its mighty fate. Visions and dreams pulsated to the music—strains of India, Malaysia, of far Mongolia woven into its throbbing war-like tones. There must be some place in the march for her! Some time in the Experiment that place would unfold and give her a part in the big things these men’s brows portended. Hope quivered through her like the life-giving warmth of the sun.

They arose from their seats, and started to mingle in the throng. Julie felt some one seize her arm. It was Ellis Wilbur, the girl who had pointed people out to her that first memorable night in Manila.

“How is the girl-hermit? I am so glad to see her back—though I wager that Providence has taken no note of the things she has done.”

Julie returned the greeting warmly.

“Did you see Barry McChord?” Ellis asked. “Isn’t it just like him to drive the things home with hammer and tongs?

“Do you feel at home in this Cataclysm here?” she demanded abruptly. “I don’t! Yet it makes my mind spring as if I had found another dimension for it. A long time hence, no doubt, I shall look back upon it with the thrill of some splendid adventure in which I ever so little engaged. I’m not a participant. I don’t care about the East, but I do care very much about the courage of this attempt to disperse the dust of ages; of which the smell is all over the East, in the hovels of the poor and the decayed dwellings of kings.”

As she started away, she remarked: “Isabel, I hear, has lost the best one of her stupendous bracelets in the water, and is frightfully cross. Don’t let her quarrel with anybody.”

A wild throb shot through Julie’s pulses. There above the crowd was again the Excelsior face—that fantastic name she had given it, oh, so long ago! The tawny head was watchfully alert, as if it were used to scanning great distances. The face, glowing and vital, had a desert tan, and in it was a hint of the desert’s awesome solitudes. His light, vigorous frame seemed to have been built for heroic purposes. It struck Julie that here was the real Atlas to hold the New World on his unbending shoulders.

Julie watched him breathlessly. People stopped him everywhere to talk. Still he was advancing in her direction. Her heart pumped so that the blood seemed to be escaping all over her body. When he was quite near, his eyes turned in her direction. He stared hard, and an abrupt change came over his face.

“It can’t be you!” he said before her, as if he expected her to contradict him. Then he added: “Some time, of course, I knew you would come back! But it’s been such a long time. Something seemed to swallow you up after that night—on the roof, you remember.”

She did remember, and it was plain that he remembered too, just as if many sorry months had not intervened. Very few people were like that—capable of taking up, as if it had just been dropped, the mood of the past. And they were back in it easily at once. It was only by an extreme chance that she was here at all. In these improbable times, where life shifted as upon a screen from day to day, any expectations were preposterous. Yet he accepted her reappearance as something that was bound to come about in chance. His certainty that they would meet again seemed strange at first, and then the strangeness vanished.

“I was called out of the room—to the cholera situation in Leyte, wasn’t it?” he went on, looking intently at her. “I thought I’d be back at once—that’s the way over here. But when I did return, you had disappeared completely—not a clew to you left.”

Julie smiled grimly. “The East misled me for a while. Now that it has found me again, I wonder—”

“It was thought that you had gone back to the States—but I knew somehow that you had not. How did you happen to go so far away?”

“It was you who sent me, that night. You breathed the fire into me that started me going. But I couldn’t show you, or God, or anybody a thing that I have done!”

His far-seeking, gold-colored eyes flamed through her. “That’s the idea that stalks us all. And we can’t live an age or two to find out what all this fine fever of our actions will boil down to. We can only go on believing that our particular fire is unquenchable. I have my misgivings, too. There are shadows lifting on the horizon at this moment that may portend untold calamity. But I am perfectly positive that victory—far along the road, perhaps—is ahead.

“As for my sending you away,” he exclaimed swiftly, “one does not, for all the causes that animate the earth, send persons like you away. How could I—a being all star-dust and light?” He looked in admiration upon her shining youth.

“I am a Pleiad!” Julie explained. “Don’t ask me where the other six are. There was no time for the human things—and a Pleiad was easy, just a puff of light.”

“I remember,” he said, “how glad I was to have found you—only to have you slip out, like a ship in a dream!”

He was regarding her deeply, as if he would search out the things that were printed most indelibly on the plate of her mind.

“You have changed!” he decided abruptly.

“Not quite so young?” She laughed wryly. “Nahal helped to cure that raw curse.”

“Come out on the gallery, and let’s talk!”

They walked to the end of the gallery overlooking the river, which, like a current of silver, stretched down through the city.

“Of course,” she told him, “when you were the means of sending me forth, I went believing that I was going to work miracles. I lived terribly stirred by that idea all the time!”

“And inevitably you must have performed them. It’s the time for miracles!”

“For you, yes.” She looked up admiringly to his heroic height. “But you see, I am only a village school-teacher and not a prince of the East. It was my beloved island, though, down there, my own domain I thought. I was to have done so much, but I really did nothing at all. All my grand purposes came to nothing. I tried to bring peace, and lift up a generation of light—that is, it always seems to me I tried to do that—and they took the children all away from me.”

The tears sprang to her eyes. “I can’t get over it—or forget it. Right there a fine sheath that enveloped me dropped to pieces. I was wholly unhappy and unsuccessful. My friends died or ceased to believe in me; my people that I was to have led to the Promised Land—Oh, don’t,” she cried, turning to him, “break your heart with a dream like that!”

His eyes, full of commiseration, flamed at her last words into visionary light. “I dream,” he declared, “of the whole darkened lengths of the East! The better state is coming,” he continued more gently, “not to one land or one race but to the whole Humanity—and the East must be in the Change, too. Up from the muddy Caliban that it is there will rise a soul to fashion a new Asia after the ideals which we brought across the sea from the greatest Republic of the world. Some time not so far off, mark my words, common coolies,” he exclaimed, “shall stand in the Holy courts of the Forbidden City and in the Temple of the Great Lama at Lhassa, the two most inviolate spots on earth, and proclaim the equality of men!”

His face was afire. He thrust his strong nervous hands through his rumpled hair.

“Some of us are daring to play a bigger game than that of this archipelago. We are bidding for stakes that are far in the future. I was in China for years before I came here—I am steeped in it, I’ll confess that, I have more than one iron in the fire. The times are beginning to take point. As an old Brahmin priest I know says; the souls of men are making ready all over the earth.”

He tingled all over with a power that seemed to communicate itself electrically to her. It was fine to be near him, to be in his atmosphere. He made her transcend her human self for a while, bore her forth on the crest of universal things.

“I want you to see the sort of things that I’m bound up in!” he said. “I want you to enter a little into my beliefs. Though, after all, we are floating on the waters of mystery.”

“A big black enigma, it all seems to me!”

“You speak as if you do not expect a solution!” he exclaimed.

“Things will have to clear awfully for that—for me at least. I have no expectations any more. Women are not heroic over here. The men do the big things. I thought I was an apostle. I find I am only a woman tramp through the East—who has lost her quest. I have made a mistake. Perhaps I should turn back!”

“Ah! Don’t talk that way. Be as wild as you please in your dreams, this is the background for them. If you could see the extent of the domain over which my aspirations dare to play! You’d think I was truly an Arabian Nights’ romancer.”

“Tell me about this domain of dreams?”

His gaze traveled far, very far off, it seemed. “My territory of the soul goes over Asia. I have stood on a tower of the Wall and have looked over the stretches of the desert, towards the heights of the Himalayas, beyond the reach of eyes. Below me lay the great uncomprehending land across which men were moving in their bitter inadequate fates. I wanted to march with them, soul to soul. I wanted to stir them to struggle and revolt. I wanted them to find a new vision. Those,” he said, turning back to her, “are still my hopes!”

“I’ve never seen China,” Julie said, after a pause. “I have always wanted to.”

“It will be the most staggering fact of the future. One scarcely dares speculate upon it, it is so incalculably vast and undecipherable. Think of the potentialities of three times our soul muster. Conceive of the disaster to the world if by any accident in a generation or two this human force arrayed itself on the wrong side! In the Boxer Rebellion, the people were hitting blindly at the world, when in reality they meant to strike at their own rotten government.”

His voice dropped. “What some of us who love China want to do is to put her on the right side of the bars—change the habit of mind of centuries; wipe out those old ivory chess-men in Pekin, and set the young China on her winged way. And for that we are willing to go to almost any lengths.”

“Aren’t you trusting a stranger with secret affairs?”

“You were never a stranger!”

Under this bestowal of faith, Julie recalled the night on the roof.

“I want to thank you,” she said with feeling, “for helping me in Nahal. I was in sore straits.”

“If I had known—” he said.

Finding no words with which to push away the obstacle of Nahal, she swept on quickly: “Do you know what I might do with my Filipino ward? He’s a small brown creature for whom there doesn’t seem to be a place in the world. I’m not a capable Providence, I fear. He wouldn’t be left behind, so I just had to bring him along with me—though what I was to do with an eleven-year-old Filipino boy, I couldn’t think. But you should have seen his little face that day looking across the water toward the magic lands. I seldom know what to do with myself, to say nothing of anybody else. What do you think I could do with him?”

“Give him to me. The boys in my house have their duties so confounded that domestic activity has very nearly come to a halt. Delphine who is just from the Provinces, and honest, can act as an official tattle-tale and break the gang. Why should you be discouraged over the nonconformity of the island of Nahal,” he demanded, “when I cannot evoke industry from a single native in my home?”

Julie pondered. “He ought to go to school,” she said. “You see, he’s a very special person. He’s caught the fire, too, and wants to forge ahead.”

“There is a school within a few squares of my house. We’ll let him go right on to school till he makes a destiny for himself, and some day when he’s president of the Philippine republic, he’ll raise a statue to you on the Luneta, as the Light of Ages.”

“I think I must have stumbled on a fairy god-father!” Julie smiled. “But they say you’re that to everybody.”

“That’s not true. I’ve never been as nice to anybody as I’ve been to you. Don’t dream for a minute that I go round adopting stray children that everybody has picked up.”

Julie laughed. “Perhaps we’d better go and move about a bit.”

They came near a group of people who seemed to have congregated in a corner of a room. Julie heard the word “Independencia!” burst with a little shock into the midst of them.

A man spoke up as if in answer to its challenge: “We are within the walls of the East—where we were called by Fate—for issues greater than we can to-day foresee.”

Julie remembered the speaker, Matfield Barron, whom Ellis Wilbur had described to her. She saw that he was addressing Isabel, who stood smiling with quiet irony.

“Woman of the Cross-roads!” he went on whimsically, “who have the East and the West in your veins—what do you think?”

Warring impulses rippled for a moment across Isabel’s face. As she stood there, torn by contentions of her race, her remarkable emotions in play, Julie perceived how different she was from every other woman in the room. Here was a woman who thought as deeply as any of them, who certainly transcended all of them in beauty and gifts, and yet who, nevertheless, belonged beyond the margin.

Some resentful flame burned through her discretion. “Under a master, can personality be preserved?”

“But yet a little while we must tarry, to lay down the foundation stones,” Matfield explained.

“Seven times seven civilizations are buried under the soil of Asia. Wait till you get as crowded as we are over here, till the very oceans are disputed—then behold the earth running with blood, and the seas on fire. You of the West struggle to expurgate from the East its human passions. You strive to teach it to inhabit your high altruistic plateau. But, you, yourselves, shall yet at some supreme urge revert to the most stupendous of those human passions. In one concentrated hour all your elevated mankind shall be at one another’s throats like wolves. You will do well to keep the East quiet then while you tear out one another’s hearts.”

Barry alone after this explosion regarded Isabel with impartial interest. “It’s horrible, of course!” he told Julie in an undertone, “but you know every time she talks like that, I almost believe her. She sounds like St. John, and I’ve always had an inkling that he was dead right. The Armageddon! Toppling thrones! But it won’t happen in my time!”

“You seem sorry!”

“Why shouldn’t I want to take part in the renewing of the earth?”

“It exhilarates you and depresses me. This is struggle enough for me. You see, I have ten million timid grandmothers back of me and it is some task to give them all a jolt.”

Isabel stepped nearer them.

“Was that the Yellow Peril you were talking about, Isabel?” Holborne smiled into his mustache.

Her olive face flushed proudly. “The peril of a United East.”

“And Ghengis Khan and his hordes will again overrun us?” he asked ironically.

“Ah! If only he would arise! If only somebody strong, strong would come!” Her gaze wandered desperately to the spot where Julie and Barry stood.

“But you have another land!” Matfield Barren expostulated. “When you lift those violet eyes of yours, I have visions of long rolling uplands, with gray mist upon them, and of the sun, and thyme, and quiet sheep.” He came nearer, and spoke in a low, persuasive tone. “We belong now to the East—the East that rejects no man; nevertheless, let us drink to that other land.”

He led her off to the punch bowl, but Julie saw that she refused the cup he offered her. Some of these people seemed to have a great deal shut up in their hearts. Julie remembered Ellis’s warning, and made a move toward Isabel; but just then somebody began to sing.

Julie thrilled with delight. The Arabian Nights’ Tales to music! One saw them all, Sindbad, Aladdin, Sheherazade, The Calenders and the Kings float wondrously by in arabesques of inconceivable tints of melody. Like magic the colorful splendor of Asian loves unfurled. The voice had a divine aroma, as if weighted with the fragrance of the gardens of Paradise.

Then it took on a new tone, and became intolerable in its play upon the soul. The girl wanted to escape. It struck too deep. It challenged the Judgment Day. Her gaze traveled around those groups of faces. Barry’s desert face looked as if he saw the veil lifted and the world in full completion of his dreams. Isabel’s twilight face was tense with suppressed exultation. The enigmatic being, Orcullu, did not appear to stir, but a fire was growing in his eyes. Shell’s somber face stared stonily into the night; Matfield Barren’s sash drooped forlornly at his side; Holborne looked into his hard hands, as if to read over their story; Leah Chamberlain was fluttering distressfully, like a bird whose wings had been caught; Chad Messenger looked suddenly pinched and weary, while Ellis Wilbur from the edge of the group caught Julie’s eye as if to challenge her to say that all this was not a dream.

The man who counted tobacco leaves left the piano.

The throng of guests gradually dissolved. While Isabel turned to speak a final word to Orcullu, Barry bent to Julie from his great height.

“I’m coming to take you for a drive to-morrow, to show you what’s happened while you were away.”

Their eyes caught in a moment of golden fire. The night on the roof of his house came back to her with a rush of overpowering recollections. Not until Isabel thrust herself between them, could she bring herself back into the self out of which she had been transported.

Isabel seemed volcanically to drive them apart. She stood looking from one to the other. Barry made a move toward the stairs. Isabel stopped him, the blue fire of her eyes ravaging his face. Julie moved away. As she walked down the steps, she glanced back and saw the two figures still standing at the head of the stairs. Isabel’s shadowy face was lifted—the wide gold bands glittering on her arms. She looked as she did in her moments of vision, as if her imagination perceived and was holding up to Barry the power of which she dreamed.

Julie undressed in her ornate bed-chamber, but she did not attempt to go to sleep. She leaned pensively against one of the carved bed posts, and stared out into the night, where the moon’s great searchlight, exploring the cities of the earth, was turned full on this Eastern one. A shining city, in the realms of darkness! Below lay the river with the bowed sleeping foliage of its shores. Riding its smooth current was a sliver of a boat, in it a solitary native caroling down the stream. How often had she watched other little boats riding silver waters in artless celebrativeness! Nahal, so far away! It would never be anything but her unconquerable kingdom—the dead garden of her soul.

All around her here were big deeds. What was the accolade these men possessed, and which she still had not found? Shell had ceded his life to it. Because of it Barry grappled tirelessly with races of men. Where among these architects of the future did she belong? She had enrolled her spirit among them. She had been so sure that there was a share for her in this splendid achievement. But the Great Adventure had passed her over. She was not metal for its forging.

But it was a hard way—this way of these agents of the future. Could one go on laboring forever in blind belief? The great structure these men were rearing might fall to pieces like a house of cards at the stroke of Isabel and Orcullu. If the Americans gave up the Islands, as it appeared they might do—a puff of smoke in the cosmos, and that would be the end of the whole thing.

She crept into bed, and dreamed of Barry as Atlas struggling to uphold a world that was falling over her head.