THE yellow junk was now abreast the landing hulks of the great international shipping companies just below the city. Rocky left the bow and made his way to the after cabins without once lifting his somber gaze to the silent figures on the poop. Slowly—his eyes wild, his thoughts beyond control, bitterness in his heart—he moved along the dim corridor.

A puff of wind found its way through an open window; a blue curtain swung out, discovering, through a doorway, Miss Carmichael, seated in a chair beneath the window. It was lighter in her cabin. She had laid aside the familiar middy blouse and skirt, and appeared to be sewing something on her petticoat. For an instant she looked up, her eyes meeting those of the pale youth who stood motionless in the corridor. The curtain swung back then; but as it swung the youth stepped through the doorway and stood within the room.

“I don't know that I asked you in,” said she coolly.

His eyes were intent on the amazing, glistening strings of pearls that were looped everywhere about her clothing.

Through narrowed lids she watched him, sitting very still, needle poised just as she had drawn it through. On his young face was an expression of firm decision that she had not before seen there. He looked oddly, now, like his father. There was, apparently, a trace of the Kane iron in him. The situation was of wholly accidental origin; he couldn't have planned it; his first expression, out in the corridor, had been of startled surprise; the decision to step within must have been instant; yet now, suddenly, he meant business. She caught all that.... Here, after all, was a young man who presented difficulties.

“Take off those pearls,” said he quietly.

“You are in my room,” said she as quietly.

“I shall take the pearls when I go.”

“You'll have my life to answer for.”

“Your life is nothing to me.”

“Your own life is.”

“Never mind about that.”

“I've warned you fairly.”

“Stand up.”

“You propose to take them from me by force?”

“Yes. Unless you choose to give them to me.”

“And you expect me to trust you with them.”

“Yes.”

There was a silence.

“Of course you are stronger than I,” she observed musingly.

He offered no reply to this.

Her thin mouth curved into the faint smile that was as cold as her calculating brain. “So”—said she “we're enemies, then?”

This evidently did not interest him.

“I think,” she went on, quietly desperate, “that I'll try crying and screaming. I'm something of an actress.”

“Scream your head off,” said he, the slang phrase sounding almost courteous in this new quiet voice of his.

“There's not a person—alive—that could prove these pearls aren't my own.” Her voice dwelt on that one telling word, “alive,” with an almost caressing note of satisfaction.

He shook his head with a touch of impatience. And she was studying him, her quick thoughts darting sharply about—-darting in every conceivable direction—for an avenue of escape. She knew, however, as the moments passed and the pale youth stood his ground that there was only one. She had supposed him weak. It hardly seemed that her judgment could have gone so far wrong.

“You're cruel to me,” she said softly.

“Stand up.”

Now she obeyed. He drew near.

“I didn't think you'd turn out this sort, Rocky. You liked me at first.” She moved a hand, hesitatingly, within reach of his own. But he ignored it. “Aren't we going to see each other at Shanghai? Are you just going to be brutal with me—like this?.... I'd like to see you.”

“Will you take them off,” said he, “or must I?”

She turned to him, with curiously mixed passions coming to life in her face.

“Oh, my God, Rocky!” she cried very low, “haven't you any human feelings? Can you just come in here—into my own room—and rob me, without a decent word?.... Haven't I played fair with you? Haven't I kept out of your way? Haven't I?....” She moved close against him, slid her sensitively thin hands over his shoulders; looked straight up into his eyes, almost honestly. “Rocky, don't tell me you're this kind!”.... She was clinging to him now.

He caught her hands, and, without roughness but with his young strength, removed them. She let them fall at her side.

“I'm not going to wait much longer on you,” he said.

“You're hard as nails, Rocky.” Her underlip was quivering; her pale eyes were a little darker, and seemed full of feeling. She turned suddenly to the rough bed, and reached under the cover for her shopping bag. Hiding it from him with her body, she opened it and took out the triangular bottle; then lingered an instant to look at the clasps of the pearl cape that were set with large, perfectly cut diamonds. There were five of the clasps, and perhaps fifty of the sparkling, glittering stones. In value they would vary somewhat-: but in themselves, even without the pearls, they represented a fortune. She quietly closed the bag and replaced it under the covers.

With the rough-edged little bottle in her hand she faced him.

“I knew a girl,” she said, with a far-away look in her eyes, “who took five of these tablets and then lived two days. She suffered terribly, of....”

He caught the bottle from her hand and threw it against the wall, where it broke. The green pills rolled about the floor.

“Oh, well,” she remarked—“I can take them after you've gone.”

“After I've gone you can do as you think best.”

“But something will have to be done about me. Rocky. You'll have to get me ashore. And see about burying me.... And you'll have to explain me.”

This moved him not at all. Apparently he was to be one of the Kanes—strong, pitiless, destined for success and power. There would be weak moments; but all that her uncannily shrewd eyes saw in him. For that matter, Miss Carmichael had known many men of the sort that in America are termed “big”—certain of them with an unpleasant secret intimacy—and each had possessed and (at moments) been possessed by strong passions. It had never been wholly a matter of what is called brain; always there had been emotional force, with a dark side as well as a bright.

Overhead the great clumsy sails creaked. Soft feet pattered about the deck. The nasal voices of the crew broke into a chantey. A chain rattled.

“We must be there,” said she. “We're anchoring, I think.” And she glanced out the window at one of the roofed-over opium hulks that lay in those days directly opposite the bund. Finally she looked again at him.

“Very well,” she said then; and raised her arms above her head. Swiftly, at once, he began stripping off the festoons of pearls. The only other thing said was her remark, in a casual tone: “It's understood that you're using force. And you'll hear from it, of course.”

As soon as he had gone she slipped into her blouse and skirt. Once again she looked thoughtfully at the radiant gems that were left to her; then went, coolly swinging the little bag, up on deck, where certain of the crew were already drawing around to the ladder at the side the sampan that had been towing astern.

Rocky had gone directly, on tiptoe, to Doane's cabin. The huge sad-faced man was there; quick, however, with a kindly smile.

Rocky said—“I beg your pardon, sir?”—stiffly, not unlike a proud young Briton—and from a tied-up handkerchief and bulging pockets—even from his shirt above his tightly drawn belt—produced enormous quantities of perfectly matched large pearls; laid them on the bed in a heap; helped Mr. Doane make a bundle of them in a square of blue cloth.

“They are yours, sir,” he explained.

He withdrew then, with a coldness of manner that to the older man was moving; and went out on deck to await his turn in the sampan.

Doane found a temporary home for Hui Fei and her sister at the mission compound of his friend, Doctor Henry Withery, in the Chinese city; himself lodging with other friends. Rocky went to the Astor House, across Soochow Creek, which was still, in 1911, a famous stopping place for the tourists, diplomats, military and commercial men, and all the other more prosperous among the white travelers that pour into Shanghai from everywhere else in the world by the great ships that plow unceasingly the Pacific and Indian Oceans and the Yellow and China Seas; to pour out again (in peaceful times) from Shanghai by rail and by lesser craft of the river and the coast to Hong Kong and Manila to Hankow, to Tientsin and Peking, to Nagasaki, Kobe, Yokohoma and Tokio.... and Shanghai had never been so crowded as now, with its thousands of travelers detained, awaiting news from this or that revolutionary center; with the American Marines and the British and German sailors; with Manchu refugees swarming into the foreign settlements; with revolutionists, queueless, wearing unaccustomed European dress, parading everywhere.

Doane found time to call at the hotel and leave word regarding the burial of his excellency; but was not to know that Rocky, himself, immured in his room, gave the word that he was out and there awaited the friendly chit that Doane sent up by the blue-robed servant. Nor was he to know that the boy dressed carefully for the ceremony, only to find the ordeal too great for his overstrung emotions. It was as an afterthought, a day or two later that Doane sent him Hui Fei's address.

It was after this sad experience that Doane, in accordance with his promise to the late Sun Shi-pi, called on Doctor Wu Ting Fang and offered his services to the revolutionary party. Another day and he was hard at work, bending his strong, finely trained and experienced mind to the great task of presenting the dreams and the activities of Young China fairly and sympathetically to the press and the governments of the Western World.... And so Griggsbv Doane, concealing—at moments almost from his own inner eye—the ache in his heart, the unutterable loneliness of his solitary existence, found himself once more fitting into the scheme of organized human life. A grave man, with sad eyes but with a slow kindly smile, always courteously attentive to the person and problem of the moment, thinking always clearly and objectively out of a comprehensively tolerant background that seemed to include all nations and all men; a gently tactful man; a tireless, powerful figure of a man, who could work twenty hours on end without a trace of fatigue, going through masses of minor detail without for a moment losing his broad view of the major problems—such was the Griggsby Doane one saw at revolutionary headquarters during that late autumn of 1911.... Life had caught him up. Whatever his private sorrow, the world needed him now. Rapidly, in all that confusion, he was formulating policies, helping to direct the current of one stream of destiny. In past years Griggsby Doane had been discussed and forgotten. He had even been laughed at as an unfrocked missionary by ribald, dominant, not infrequently drunken whites along the coast. It occurred to no one to laugh at him now.

These were the days when in half the provincial capitals of China the Manchus that had ruled during nearly three centuries were hunted to their death, men and women alike, like vermin. Bloody heads decorated the lamp posts that had been erected in the Western fashion beside freshly macadamized streets. Slaughter, as in other dramatic moments in Oriental history, had become a pastime. Palaces and wealthy homes in a hundred cities were looted and burned, and a vast new traffic started up in the silks and paintings and pottery and objects of art suddenly thrown into the market.... Hankow had been taken by the imperial troops, but was to be recaptured as a charred, gutted ruin. General Li Yuan-hung was now “president of the Republic of China,” up at Wu Chang, by right of military organization and popular acclaim. Admiral Sah, of the Imperial Navy, was about to witness the unanimous mutiny of his fleet. The great Yuan Shi-K'ai, himself a Chinese born, was in command of the imperial troops while negotiating on either hand with the frantic throne and the upsurging revolutionists. At Peking heads were falling and great princes were fleeing or hiding pitifully within the walls of the legations.... Within a few weeks Sun Yat Sen was to leave London on his long journey eastward by way of Suez and Singapore, but without the enormous golden treasure so confidently expected by the revolutionists. Before his arrival, even, he was to be elected president of the new China, in the recently captured Nanking—where a National Assembly in cropped heads and frock coats already would be grinding out fresh tangles of legislation.... The event was outrunning the mental capacity of man. What was now tragic confusion would grow through the swift-following years into tragic chaos, as the most numerous and most nearly inert of peoples struggled out of the sluggish habit of centuries toward the dubious light of modernity.

But through the chaos Griggsby Doane was never for a moment to lose the new vision that had finally cleared his long troubled mind. Behind the crumbling of the empire, underlying the torn and bleeding surface of Chinese life, lay a tradition finer, he was to believe until his dying day, than any so far developed in the truculent West—a delicate responsiveness to beauty in nature and art, a reflective quality, an instinct for peace—it was all these at once, and more; a blend of art in living and living in art; a finish that was exquisite in concept, a sensitiveness that lifted the soul of man above the ugly fact. Even the brittle perfection of Chinese etiquette—regulating every passing human contact, clothing in silken manner the naked thought—was like a fine lacquer over the knotted wood of life... America, he felt, with all its earnestly insistent young virtues, worshiped the fact. To the Americans must be preached the gospel of sensitive thought, of reflective enjoyment of the beautiful. Those old master painters of Tang and Sung breathed beauty; it was sweet air in their lungs; whereas in America beauty was too often like a garment to be bought in a shop and worn for show.... Yes, this revolutionary work was a gratifying opportunity for service, of great momentary importance because the Chinese people must be rescued from Manchu conquerors and their eunuchs, from disease and famine, and from ignorance of the new world that had come amazingly, brutally, into being while the old Middle Kingdom slumbered; but it was not the main work. The aggressively greedy West, now, with its merchants and war-ships and armies, was destroying the soul of China even while teaching her a smattering of the materialistic new faith. There must be a counter-influence; as the East now so strongly felt the West, so must be the West made sensitively aware of the East. It was fair give and take. It might yet help the world to find a stable balance.... This was what the difficult life of Griggsby Doane was coming to mean. The East had crept into his heart. So he must turn back to the West.

For three days Mr. Doane's brief chit—with the address of Hui Fei in the native city—burned in Rocky Kane's pocket; then, early in the third afternoon, he went down to the Japanese steamship offices (for the keen little brown people had already captured the Pacific traffic from the Americans) and bought the second officer's room on a crowded liner leaving at the end of the week for San Francisco.... On the fourth afternoon he called a rickshaw and rode out beyond the American post-office to the address the older man had given him.

But Mr. Doane, it appeared, was not in; already he was established at Doctor Wu's revolutionary headquarters. Rocky considered driving there; even took the address and rode part of the way: but reconsidered, returned to the hotel, and sent a messenger to Hui Fei with this chit:

“I'm sailing Saturday. Do you feel that you could see me for a few moments?”

The reply, within the hour, bade him come. He found her in Western dress—-a tailored suit, very simple; her glistening black hair parted smoothly—as he would always most vividly remember it—gently sad in manner, yet able to smile. She would be like that, come to think of it; not crushed by the tragedy, not sunken in the grief that, among Westerners, is so often a sort of histrionic egotism.... They sat in a tiled courtyard among dahlias. More than ever like a proud young Briton was Rocky.

“It is good of you to see me.” Thus he began.... “I couldn't go without a word.”

She murmured then: “Of course not.”

“I want you to know, too, that I am coming to see”—he had to pause; in this new phase of sober young manhood he had not yet achieved steady self-control.

She broke the silence with a question about the revolution. It is to his credit that he talked, stumbling only at first, clearly. And as the strain of the meeting gradually relaxed, he became aware of her sobered but still intense absorption in the struggle; aware, too, increasingly, of her strong gift of what is called personality. Her mind was quick, bright, eager—better, it seemed (he had to fight bitterness here) than his own. And she was impersonal to a degree that he couldn't yet attain—couldn't, in fact, quite understand. He had to speak slowly and carefully; feeling his way with a dogged determination among uprushing emotions, moved as never before by the charm of appearance and manner and speech of which she was so prettily unconscious.... He had come—perhaps with more than a touch in him of (again) that Western histrionism, the intense overstressing of the individual and his feelings—as a man who was effacing himself that the woman he loved might be happy with another man. Confused with this wholly unconscious call upon the sympathies, undoubtedly, was an unphrased incredulity that she—so strongly a person, fine and courageous and outstanding as he knew her to be—could accept this being almost casually left as part of a legacy to that other man. It was incredible. Unless she loved the other man.... So he came around again to the personal; unaware, of course, that he was feeling inevitably with his strongly individualistic race. Even when she dwelt on race, a little later in their talk, he found no light. He couldn't have; for the American seldom can see what lies outside himself.

“I don' know yet what I can do,” she was saying, very honestly and simply (they hadn't yet mentioned Mr. Doane). “Of course I'm a Manchu, after all. An' blood does coun'. I feel that. A good many people to-day talk differen'ly, I know. We saw a good 'eal of Socialism at college. The idealists to-day—the Jews an' Russians an' even some of our Chinese students—the younger men—talk as if race doesn' matter. But of course it does. It will ta' thousan's of years, I suppose, to bring the races together. An' maybe it's impossible. Maybe it can' be done at all. I think tha's the tragedy of so much of this beautiful dreaming.... An' here you see I'm a Manchu, an' yet I wan' the Manchus put out of China. Because they won' let China grow. An' China mus' grow, or die.”

He was moodily watching her; head bowed a little, gazing out under knit brows. “Do you know,” he said, “it's a queer thing to say, of course, but sometimes you make me feel terribly young.”

She smiled faintly. “You are—rather young, Rocky.”

He closed his eyes and compressed his lips; his name, on her lips, was dangerously thrilling music to him. After a moment he went doggedly on.

“The crowds I've gone with at home haven't talked about these things. They wouldn't think it good form.”

“I know,” said she. “They woul'n'.”

“I'm beginning to wonder if we're—well, intelligent, exactly. You know—just motors and horses and girls and bridge and 'killings' in Wall Street.”

“Killings?” Her brows were lifted.

“Oh—picking up a lot of money, quick.”

“That,” she mused, “is what I sometimes worry about. You know, I love America. I have foun' happiness there. I love the books an' the colleges and the freedom an' all the goo' times. But it is true, I think—money is God in America. Pipple don' like to have you say it, of course. But I'm afraid it is true. Ever'-thing has to come to money—the gover'men', the churches, ever'thing. I have seen that. That is the hard side of America. I don' like that so well.” Finally—coming down, helplessly, on the personal, yet with a courageous light in his eyes—he said: “I do want you to know this—Hui. You won't mind my speaking of my love for you—”

Her hand moved a very little way upward. “Please! I can't help that. It's my life now. I'm full of you. And it has changed me. I'm—I'm going back.... I'm going at things differently. I want you to know that. Because if I hadn't met you it couldn't possibly have happened. And if I hadn't—well, learned what it means to love a wonderful girl like you. I want you to know how big the change is that you've made.”

“Rocky,” she said gently—“will you do something for me?” He waited...."I wan' you to go back to college.”

“I've already made up my mind to that,” he replied, more quietly. “It's the job for me now. It's the next thing.”

“I'm glad,” said she. “An' I'd love it if you'd write to me sometimes.”

He inclined his head.

Then, for a moment, his old turbulent inner self unexpectedly (even to himself), lifted its head.

“I tried to see Mr. Doane—that is, I thought perhaps I ought to tell him that I was coming out here.”

She seemed slightly puzzled at this. Her lips framed questioningly the words: “Tell him?”

“I—I perhaps can't say much—but I'm sure you and he will be happy. I—oh, he's a big man. He's terribly busy now, of course—you know what he's doing—at Wu Ting Fang's headquarters?”

She inclined her head rather wearily, saying: “He wrote me a ver' kin note—jus' to say that he was busy.”

“They talk about him some at the hotel. All of a sudden he seems to be a power here.”

She went without a further word into the house, returning with a slip of paper. Into her manner had crept at the mention of Doane's name, a gentler, more wistful quality that she seemed not to think of concealing; it was even a confiding quality, intimately friendly.

“I don' quite un'erstand it,” she said. “A gen'leman called from the Hong Kong Bank an' lef' this.”

Rocky read the paper; a receipt for a sealed parcel of pearls and for other separate jewels and a sum of money.

“Oh—he put it all there in your name,” said he, while a sudden new hope rose into his drying throat and throbbed in his temples.

“Yes. It puzzle' me—a little.”

He turned the paper over and over in his fingers, once again struggling to think.... She sat motionless, gazing at the dahlias.

Blindly then he groped for her hands, found them and impulsively gripped them.

“Hui”—he whispered huskily—“tell me—if it's like this—if you—if he.... All this time I've supposed you and he were.... I want you to come with me to America. We both do love it there. I'll give up my life to making you happy. I'll slave for you. I'll make of my life what you say. just let us try it together....”

She silently heard him out—through this and much more, leaving her hands quietly in his. Finally then, when the emotional gust seemed in some measure to have spent itself, she said, gently:

“Rocky, I wan' you to listen to what I'm going to tell you. You said I make you feel young. Well—can' you see why? Can' you see that I'm quite an ol' lady?”

“But that's nonsense! You—” His eyes were feasting on her soft skin and on the exquisite curve of her cheek.

“No—you mus' listen! First tel me how old you are.”

Unexpectedly on the defensive, Rocky had to compose himself, arrange his dignity, before he could reply. “I was twenty-one in the summer.”

“Ver' good. An' I was twenty-five in the spring.”

“But—”

“Please! I don' know what you coul' have thought—how young you thought I was when I wen' to college. But tha's the way it is. I'm an ol' lady. I have learn' to like you ver' much. I'm fond of you. I wan' to feel always tha' we're frien's. But we coul'n' be happy together. Our interes' aren' the same—they coul'n' be. Can' you see, Rocky? If there is something abou' me tha' stirs you—that is ver' won'erful. But we mus'n' let it hurt you. An' that isn' the same as marriage. Marriage is differen'—there mus' be so much in common—if a man an' woman are to live together an' work together, they mus' think an' hope an'....”

Her voice died out. She was gazing again, mournfully at the dahlias. When he released her hands they lay limp in her lap.

With a great effort of will he wished her every happiness, promised to write, and got himself away.

This was on Thursday. Rocky walked at a feverish pace from the native city to the European settlement that was so quaintly not Chinese—more, with its Western-style buildings that were decorated with ornamental iron balconies and richly colored Chinese signs, like a “China-town” in an American city—and wandered for a time along Nanking Road; then out to Bubbling Well Road; away out, past the Country Club to the almost absurdly suburban quarter with its comfortably British villas; seeing, however, little of the busy life that moved about him, threading his way over cross-streets without a conscious glance at the motorcars and pony-drawn victorias (with turbanned mafoos cracking their whips) and bicycles and the creaking passenger wheelbarrow's on which fat native women with tiny stumps of feet rode precariously. For those few hours were to be recalled in later years as the quietly darkest in the young man's life. There was no question now of dissipation; he knew with the decisiveness of the Kanes that he had turned definitely away from the morbid oblivion of alcohol and opium, as from the unhealthy if exciting diversion of loveless women. But the bitterness would not down all at once. Indeed it was savagely powerful, still, to cloud his reason. The only evidence of victory over self of which he was aware was the fact that he could now look almost objectively at himself, and could fight.

He was back at the hotel between seven and eight, but couldn't eat. For an hour he walked his room, locked in. Then, in sheer loneliness, a little afraid of himself, he went down to the spacious lounge and sat in a corner, behind a palm, staring at a copy of the China Press and listening, all overstrung nerves, to the cackle and laughter of the self-centered tourists and the curiously bold and loud commercial men from across the Pacific. He heard this, in his younger way, as Doane would have heard it, even as Hui; it was all heedless, light-brained; careless.... Confused with the bitterness (in a bewildering degree) was a sense of the finely reflective atmosphere that had lately enveloped him and that he was not to lose easily. He felt—sitting, all nerves, in this babel—the fine old Chinese gentleman who had gone serenely to the death that was his destiny. He felt—constantly, intensely—the princess who had brought to her American college an instinct for culture the like of which neither he nor any of his friends at home had brought or found there. And he felt Mr. Doane—felt a spaciousness of mind in the man, a patience, a tolerance—felt him as a gentleman—felt him while still, in his heart, he was bitterly fighting him.... The thing had closed over his head—the sheer quality of these remarkable folk. He was simply out of a cruder world. He hadn't the right to stand with them—the simple right of character and breeding. And no amount of determination, no amount of storming at it could alter the fact. It would take years of patient work. Ever, then he might miss it; for his environment soon again would be that of the cackling tourists he now hated. Even at college it would be all the dominant athletics, the parties and the motors and girls and drinking, the association with those sons of prosperous families who were all consciously cementing alliances with the financial upper class that quietly ruled America while hired politicians prated and performed without in the smallest measure controlling or even altering the blatant facts.... He and his kind, at college, despised the “grind.” And you had to be a grind if you weren't the other thing. Yet Hui Pei had managed it differently. She was neither and both. It seemed to be a difference of mental texture....

A slim girl, richly dressed, with a sable wrap about her shoulders and a pretty little hat, was threading her way among the crowding chairs and tables and the talkative groups in the lounge. He glanced up: then looked closely. It was Dixie Carmichael. She stood before him, wearing her icy, faintly mocking smile. He rose.

“How are you?” said she.

He could only incline his head with a sort of courtesy, and contrive an artificial smile. He seemed to have been dreaming, outrageously. Life had begun now'.

“I'm running down to Singapore,” said she. “Friends there. And a look-see?”

“Oh,” he murmured, “indeed.” She looked out-and-out rich; and she was surprisingly pretty, without a sign that she had ever known danger or even care.

“Staying here?” she asked.

“No. I start back home Saturday.”

“So?.... Well, that'll be pleasant.” With a final glance of what seemed almost like triumph she sailed away. And he knew that in taking the pearls he had not taken all from her. Apparently, too, she meant him to know it. That would be her moment of triumph. And that was all; not a word was spoken regarding his violence or her threats.... He saw the yellow porters carrying out her luggage of bright new leather.

He resumed his seat; twitched for a time with increasing nervousness; got up and went aimlessly over to the desk; asked the Malay clerk for mail.

A smiling little Japanese appeared, rather officious about a great lot of bags and a trunk or two that were coming in. He had a familiar look; even raised his hat and stepped forward with outstretched hand. It was Kato.... And then Dawley Kane came in—tall, quiet, neatly dressed, his nearly white mustache newly cropped.

To his pale son Dawley Kane said merely—“Well!”—as he took his hand; and then was busy registering. That done, he asked: “Had dinner?” Rocky shook his head. “I don't care for any.” Daw ley Kane's quietly keen eyes surveyed his son. “What's the matter? Not well.”

“I'm well enough.”

“Sit down with me, can't you?” And turning to the attending Japanese he said: “You'll excuse me Kato. I'll be dining with my son. And tell Mr. Braker, please.... Just a minute Rocky, till I wash my hands.”

They were shown to a table in the great diningroom, where the cackling was louder than in the lounge (they dine late on the coast)—where blue-gowned waiters moved softly about as if there had never been a revolution and wine glasses glistened and prettily bared shoulders gleamed roundly under the electric lights.

And Rocky, seated gloomily opposite this powerful quiet man—who took him unerringly in of course; dishearteningly, Rocky felt—found himself in a depression deeper than any he had known before. His father was so strong and he brought back with him the enveloping atmosphere of the mighty, splendidly successful white world in which they both belonged—a world that crushed the heart out of weaker peoples while it blandly talked the moralities. He felt it as a Juggernaut. It had the amazingly successful racial blend of character and plausibility. That would be the British quality; and, more roughly and confusedly, the American.

“Getting rather interesting up the river.” remarked Dawley Kane, over his soup. “How'd you get down?”

“On a junk.”

“Any trouble?”

“Oh—some.”

“Been here long?”

“Several days. I'm sailing Saturday.”

“Sailing?” Mr. Kane raised his eyebrows. “Where?”

“Home.”

“You decided not to consult me?”

“Oh.... Don't ride me, father! It's the next thing. I'm going back to college.”

“Oh—I see.” Mr. Kane looked over the menu, ordered his roast, and selected a red wine, cautioning the waiter to set it near the stove for five minutes. “It's wicked to heat Burgundy,” he said, when the waiter had gone, “but it's the only way you can get it served at the right temperature. I discovered that when we were here before.... I gather, my boy, that you've come to your senses in the matter of that little yellow girl.”

Rocky did not wince outwardly; he merely sat still. But his mind, at last, was active. And he knew—saw it in a flash—that no explanation he could possibly make, would be intelligible. You can not—yet—talk across the gulf between the worlds. It was his first intelligent glimpse of the tremendous fact that Doane had so long and so clearly felt and seen. So he merely—at last, when his father looked closely at him—inclined his head and said, huskily:

“I'm going to work out this college business'. That's my job clear enough.”

This new attitude was to bring, later in the evening, confidences from the father.

“It's been an interesting journey for me, Rocky.” Thoughtfully Dawley Kane smoked his Manila cigar.

“It's enabled me to understand somewhat the delicate international situation out here. I couldn't see why our agents weren't accomplishing more. The trouble is, of course, that every square foot of China's staked out by the European nations. If you don't believe that, just get a concession from the Chinese Government—for a big job—water power development, mining, railway building, or an industrial monopoly—that part of it isn't so hard—and then try to carry it through. You'd find out fast enough who are the real owners of China. And those owners would never let you start. Great Britain controls this great empire of the Yangtze Valley as completely as she controls India. France owns the south—Russia the northwest and the north—Japan, from Korea and Lower Manchuria is penetrating the northwest, too; they're bound, the Japanese, to tip Russia out one of these days, and they're very clever and patient about slipping into the British regions. They've got the Germans to contend with, too, in the Kiochow region. But someday—either in the event of the final break-up of China or in the event of the European nations coming to an out-and-out squabble (which is almost a certainty, at that) Japan will be found to have pulled off most of the big prizes for herself. We'll have to fight Japan someday, I suppose—over the control of the Pacific—but in the meantime, those little people are the best bet. They know the East as the rest of us don't, they're clever, and their diplomats aren't hampered by the sort of half-enlightened public opinion that's always tripping us up in the West—sentimental idealism, that sort of thing—and they control their press infinitely better than we do. They've got everything, the Japanese, except money. And we've got the money. It'll be just a question of security, that's all; and watching them pretty closely. I've made up my mind to play it that way.... A survey of the actual conditions out here makes our American diplomacy look pretty naive. We talk idealism—open door and all—while all the rest of them are moving in and setting up shop and getting the money.”

Later, in Dawley Kane's spacious suite overlooking the park-like street where the colored lanterns of the rickshaws glowed pleasantly under the trees, the father said, laying a hand affectionately on the boy's shoulder:

“I can't tell you how happy you've made me, Rocky. It looks as if you'd turned your corner. Just don't go in for too much thinking about what you've been through. There's nothing in remorse. As a matter of fact, a little rough experience is a good thing for a boy. After you get your balance you'll be all the closer to life for it.... Go ahead with your college plans, get your degree, and then after a year or two in the New York office I'll bring you out here. We shall be playing for big stakes. And we shall need good men.... That's the whole problem, really—the men. I had my eyes on this man Doane, but he turned out to be only a sentimentalist after all.”

It was the hopelessness of it that drove Rocky out—after a respectful good night—and over to the revolutionary headquarters. He knew that Mr. Doane worked most of the night; and took what sleep he got on a cot there.