Julie moved quickly, to hide any appearance of having heard what had so extraordinarily transpired. That flash of words and glances had disturbed every cell of her mind. She was still quivering when Isabel spoke at her elbow.

“Julie, I never saw any one who let herself be so eaten up by things. You are as white as a ghost. Is it,” she turned to look more closely at Julie, “the head again?”

Julie looked back at her, troubled. “Oh, yes,” she said, “it aches all the time.”

“And have you done nothing about it?”

The girl looked embarrassed. “The doctors might want to open me up, to find out what is the matter. Besides, they charge what Father Hull calls American prices.”

“Better keep away from them,” Isabel agreed, turning away.

Barry’s guests, with their tea-cups in their hands, sauntered through the rooms, examining his collections. The object of greatest interest was a bright red chair gleaming like coals of fire, with in-set golden dragons.

“The throne of the East!” Ellis explained. “Red lacquer, glazed all over with poison, and as ancient as Solomon. Emperors have sat in it, and the devil himself; and because of it execution grounds have run red.”

Observing Isabel staring intently at the chair, Commissioner Caples playfully remarked: “Indeed and you’d look very pretty in it, my dear—with a tower of jewels on your head and a fringe of pearls hanging down over your eyes, so that nobody could have an inkling of what you were about. We’d have another splendid Dowager.”

The guests drifted out to the various engagements evening always brought. Sir John went to his room to read his letters.

Barry beckoned to Julie. “There is something I want to show you!” All afternoon there had been in his manner the intimation of showing his things especially to her.

She followed him into a room, where he pointed out a large framed picture of the Wall of China going over the mountains into Manchuria. Instantly there sprang before her mind the vision of it climbing in the evening light the steep foot-hills, up to the dark tops of the mountains, where its splendid watch towers rose like a crown against the sky.

“It’s a segment of the human mind, in stone!” she breathed.

He pointed to a gate tower set high upon the Wall. “The Gate of the World looking out upon Asia! It is far beyond there that Sun Yat Sen is shortly to march afoot, secretly, on his mission—to shake an empire. I’d give my soul to go! For what other life could offer a thing like that?”

He turned on a light, and abruptly pulled out some camphor chests. Opening them up, he tossed out their contents. Julie dropped down on her knees and watched the rare fabrics flow forth: lustrous brocades, and cobweb tissues, sparkling with jeweled lights. He unlocked carved and scented ivory boxes, and chains of amethysts like drops of wine trembled out in a thin stream; then came sapphires like blue winking eyes of the night, and a little sack of pearls that took Julie’s breath wholly away.

“Am I in Ali Baba’s treasure cave?” she exclaimed.

He smiled. “I have seen Ali Baba’s treasure cave, in Ceylon. There is a certain shop there which has been kept by generations of a family. Indian princes go to Ali Sherif for their jewels. Lots of these things I got there for prices unheard of in Europe. When I passed through last, Ali Sherif was celebrating his son’s marriage. I fell to praising some of the jewels of the native prince, and, stirred by the mood of the day, Ali invited me to go with him into the underground vaults of his house. There on the floors of those cellars were fabulous hills that blazed up under his torch into every incredible kind of gleaming sun—all garnered and stored away there by generations of jewel-smiths.”

Julie picked up and held admiringly in her hand a dazzling medallion of white jade with a single hieroglyphic carved upon it.

“That’s supposed to be a whale of a charm!” Barry explained, observing her fascination. “Belonged to the Imperial family. I got it at the same time I got the chair. Caples always insists that nothing short of a crime on my part could have brought either of them into my possession; but fleeing princes will part with anything for a chance at life.”

He drew a thin chain from one of the boxes, passed it through the hole that was pierced in the piece of jade, and slipped it around her neck. “There you have a charm from the Lama’s Temple in Lhassa. And there isn’t a charm in Asia to beat its power. There’s scarcely a Mongolian that won’t bow down to it. I’ll have a catch fixed for it, and send it to you.”

Julie, seated among these riches, smiled up at him, to find his whole being concentrated upon her in an intense look that lifted her out of herself into a new personality so thrillingly comprehensive that it seemed in touch with a world of vivid inspirations. Bonds seemed momentarily to be cut behind her; she felt herself slipping on wings into high areas. All about her, agitating her soul to its depths, was this great wordless offering.

Chad and Isabel had not left. Chad, who had a poetic passion for oriental art, had become absorbed in some rare vases which Barry had recently received from China. Isabel, between moments of fitful contemplation of the red chair, stirred restlessly about, contriving in her movements to reconnoiter along the gallery into the adjoining room. Turning her eyes back warily upon the preoccupied Chad, she every now and then leaned around the wall between the two doors, and obtained glimpses of what was taking place between Barry and Julie. Her dark head, listening acutely, was stealthily thrust forward and withdrawn like the head of some tropical serpent.

Chad uttered some remark, and she slipped quickly back. He glanced up, and his gaze became transfixed with amazed repugnance. After all, the creatures of the East were black-hearted bats, he thought. Rosalie had been sufficiently disillusioning, but here was Isabel—who had always stood to his mind as a racial justification—looking like the root of all evil.

“Come here!” she persuaded.

He put down the vase and followed her, but the stealth in her movements irritated him; and when she whispered tensely for him to look through the door toward which she was drawing him, he was inclined to rebel. But what he saw appeared wholly to chain his attention. He stared in silence for a moment at the two figures beyond, then veered back with a suppressed curse.

Isabel was breathing hard. “You know about those chests!” she exclaimed. “They are a fancy of his. He has been filling them a long time—for a woman—the woman! We did not want any woman to come, did we, and overturn his existence?”

He scowled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean his destiny—his work,” she cried passionately. “You know what I mean. Nobody must get in his way!”

“You don’t think that Barry—and that cobweb of a girl!” Then he muttered fiercely. “Barry shan’t throw himself away too!”

“And she’s wrapped up in another man. She was about to be married to him down South, but they quarreled.”

“Barry’s career has no place in it for any woman—least of all for her.” Chad seemed to be arguing with himself, or the universe. “Why should this moonlit wraith come along and attempt to throw everything into an eclipse? What would he amount to after she got into his soul?” He appealed to Isabel: “Isn’t there any way to get her out of his path?”

Isabel’s features set into a mask. “She’s in the way!” she repeated vehemently. She glanced at Chad sharply to fathom how deep his meaning went.

“Resurrect the other man!” he hazarded desperately. “Barry shan’t be caught in this undertow! I’ve prayed like a Parsee that he would keep out!”

At that moment Barry and Julie appeared in the doorway. The two gazed at them, wondering.

“I’m going to drive Miss Dreschell home!” Chad suddenly announced. “She never takes the trouble to talk to me, so I, am going to seize this chance.”

As they drove together through the twilight, it became clear to Julie that Chad had set himself to some psychological investigation. She was aware that in floating into his circle of life, she had aroused in him some inexplicable distrust.

What he managed to evolve after a bit was that in order that Barry should meet the peculiar hazards of his career, it was expedient for him to remain single-hearted. Ellis Wilbur, Julie recalled, amid her contending emotions, had said exactly the same thing. Was everybody in the East a self-appointed guardian over Barry’s emotions? It gave her a feeling of being floated persistently away from his existence.

No, Barry must not be carried under by the current of stressful emotions, as Chad painfully intimated he himself had been. He contrived to make clear that what he chiefly resented in Julie was a certain disturbingly inefficacious flame of being, which he took occasion to compare to a light-house open to the winds of the seas.

He did not deny, now that she was under observation, the starry quality of her substance, but he regarded it as nothing more than an accident of soul. Nothing ever would come from it, and Barry, he pointed out, would be led astray by it, would follow in its futile trail, a blind lopped-off scrap of the sun.

“After a while,” he continued, with the same extraordinary frankness, “after you’ve dipped a finger in the pie, you will go right back to the doing of endlessly inconsequential things and Barry, perhaps you know, is committed to going on.” Julie understood that he referred to Barry’s secret activities outside the islands.

She regarded him gloomily. “I think you are perfectly right in assuming that nothing I shall ever do will bear fruit. Once I tried to pull the fire down out of the skies to light a few little clods of earth, but the creatures only thought it was to burn them up.”

“I think you will find that you pulled down that fire to make a halo for your own head. For all your hallowed way, you came into the East hunting tremendous things for yourself.”

Julie colored angrily. “I’ve seen for a long time that you don’t like me, but I find no justification for an insult!”

Chad’s tone changed. “I am not trying to do that. It isn’t that I dislike you—but that I wish you hadn’t happened.” A tense earnestness broke out on his harassed face. “How can I make you understand about Barry! What is it that fills the atmosphere here? What do you feel in the air?”

“Belief—burning belief in the work,” Julie dejectedly replied.

“Yes, but mixed up with it, as there is mixed up in every high impulse in man, you find the darker strain. Read the mood of this place, and in it you will find expectation—human expectation, everywhere high. Look at Isabel, for its greatest extravagance!”

“Yes,” Julie agreed, “she looks and talks as if she lived in the greatest expectation of an extraordinary climax for herself.”

“And that’s what in differing degrees they all expect. The high, clear strain is working for the cause, and working hard, but the dark strain is using this place as a training ground for personal power. Take those people you met the other night at Isabel’s: Holborne—he’s a prime fighter, but do you think he’ll not desert the field when some other background offers to set Holborne off to better advantage? And Leah Chamberlain—what but a play-ground of the passions is this to her? And to Ellis Wilbur, what but a rough struggle that she won’t engage in, for fear of getting hurt? I could name you a lot of others to illustrate how this priceless and incorporeal endeavor, this Republic of the Sun—which is a movement to take hold of the heart of the East, and not a South African or Klondike gold-fields rush serves solely for the aggrandizement of human personalities.”

He paused, and looked at her keenly. “So when you see one simple, splendid exception, you’ve just got to hang on to it by your teeth! Outside of Father Hull, there is just one person in this whole Archipelago who has sought nothing, absolutely nothing for himself. He has never had a ruling prince’s job, though the Government has often to go and get him when it’s in a pinch. Though he’s the best known man in the Islands, he’s never dreamed of making himself into a political power— He’s just the ‘Mayor of Manila’—a wholly make-believe title, since there’s no such thing; but I know of no personality that by scattering itself freely has come into such an accruement of power.

“That’s what sets him apart. That’s what through all contingencies will cause him to survive—because neither fate nor God can get along without an agency like that.”

To hide her emotion Julie looked out into the dusk. Again Nahal, with all its eternal futility, arose like a bar to the universe. In vain she tried to push the vision off her horizon: there, she knew, it would stand always as the total of her spirit’s achievement.

Chad went on, but with less assurance now. “I have heard that there is—that there might be another factor in this thing. Perhaps it could happily be made the determining one. I refer to—the other man. Couldn’t he be hurried along? This is absolutely his moment. I offer you my assistance in every way, to make it clear to him that this is the time to step in.”

Julie threw him a sharply amazed glance. “Why should Isabel have repeated that? How can you talk about things you don’t understand? I needn’t answer you, of course, but I will. The man you speak of is never coming back. Nobody but Isabel would have dreamed of such a thing.”

“Then why sit in this dark thrall and wait for him?”

Julie drew away in fresh surprise. “Could it occur to you that this probing might become painful?” She put her hands to her head. “But it’s because I don’t blame you greatly that I reply at all.” She lifted her head, and looked at him with a great earnestness. “You found out that I was—waiting; but you didn’t know for what. I’ll tell you now,” she almost sobbed. “I wanted to be released from the dark, brutal spell of failure—I wanted to recapture a last territory of my soul.”

After he had left Julie at her gate, Chad drove to Isabel’s house. Isabel was one of Chad’s best friends. Beautiful and seductive as an houri, she was surrounded in both his mind and Barry’s with the romance and tragedy of an unappeased Kundry soul. Her fallen ambitions among her father’s race touched them. They were haunted by the cruel fact that the East alone offered a destiny; and though she was their antagonist, they courted and admired her. Her wild aspirations they had credited to her natural mental opulence, and her environment. Recent events, however, were tending to shake some of their comfortable convictions.

The houses of the East are open, and there are no bells. Dicky-Dicky, the dwarf, whose duty it was to stand on guard at the stair case, was nowhere about when Chad arrived. He climbed the stairs and, completely at home, sat down on the railing of the gallery, and looked at the river, the view of which from this point was always enchanting.

A light burned in the sala, but the rest of the house appeared to be in darkness. Isabel, no doubt, had not reached home. He would wait for her.

Voices from somewhere back of him floated indistinctly at first across his thoughts. Then, as the sounds became clearer, and arresting in their significance, his attention focused. In his long sojourn in the islands he had picked up the use of the Tagalog dialect. He heard an exclamation, and recognized the voice as Isabel’s.

“And so this pilgrimage of spells and charms, and working upon lives, goes on, Witch of Arayat!”

Chad pricked up his ears instantly. The Witch of Arayat had been a fantastic legend when he at first came to the islands. From the obscurity of the years, Isabel had evidently raised to life her spell-casting mother.

“The march is long,” a fainter voice replied. “First I sought the Covenant in the Golden Ark on the Sacred Mountain. Now I seek it all over the earth. Why have you sent for me?”

“When one greatly needs, one sends for one’s mother.”

“I gave you all when I left.”

“I sent for you to work a spell for me! I want Paradise, my Mother. But my hands can not reach it. So I have sent for you to help me.”

Isabel was capable of reverting to the superstition of her blood! To win her aspirations, whatever they might be, she had resurrected the Charm-Woman. They were all like that. Rosalie had told him that in order to win his love she had steadily taken magic potions.

The voices died down for a moment. Chad sat wondering. He fancied he saw a tremor in the curtains that screened Isabel’s apartment. Two words of the droning syllables back flared audible again.

“A medicine!”

Chad stirred uneasily. He did not wish to hear about any more potions. Just then from the spot where he had seen the curtains tremble, Dicky-Dicky the dwarf emerged hurriedly and passed without seeing him.

“He’s been listening!” Chad concluded. Eavesdropping was a common oriental pastime; but the appearance of the dwarf indicated that he had understood something in that interview beyond that Chad had not. What mischief were Isabel and her mother up to? Some new political scheming, perhaps.

Suddenly Isabel, her face like a spot of darkness against the lighted room, appeared. Chad rose startled, as if some black whirlwind were approaching him. Here was the passion of the Levant that he always veiled—that dreadful ravening primeval force that assailed and overthrew his ideals. Of course, innately, he had always expected Isabel to be like this. He knew instinctively that she was a volcano around which they had sat in false peace.

Something had shaken terribly Isabel’s exotic universe. Some secret word had come perhaps of the bursting of the bubble—hers and Orcullu’s. Whatever this emotion was, it broke from deeper sources than he could divine. It took him several moments to open his mouth in the face of it.

“I stopped to tell you that I have talked with the girl, and I fear that there is no use trying to get that other man back.”

He paused, finding it difficult to refer to the sensibilities of his own race. They appeared to lift like inconsequential bubbles before this inconceivable mood.

But that fierceness continued to make demand upon him. “It’s too bad,” he added. “The affair turns out to be merely a tryst with her own soul. But—” He tried to get Barry’s name out, and failed. What he wanted to do was to reassure their mutual fears concerning Barry, and to declare confidently that Barry would keep clear of the complication. Instead, he found himself edging toward the stairs while that gathering dreadfulness followed him.

He descended without looking behind him, but he could see through the back of his head Isabel’s image, while ahead of him Rosalie’s rice-powdered face seemed to wave across his path; and in that moment he thanked God that he had never begotten children of the East.