"Beneath the moon Manila was agleam. The whole firmament was liquid with the light; it poured down like luminous rain, slid in cascades over the church domes, the tin roofs, the metallic palms, till the whole earth shimmered back to the skies. In the entire city only one spot gloomed--the old fort, mysterious and pestilential with its black oozing walls, its fever-belting moat; but beyond it, as if in exasperation at this stubborn nonconformity, the brightness broke out again triumphant in the glimmering sheen of the bay. "But from that serenity he turned, and he looked back, he had to look back. He peered into the room of infamy, peered at the bed, rising black and monumental in the farther depths, at the heaps of clothing here and there in cynical promiscuity, at the pile of greasy cooking utensils upon the stand, at the whole ensemble of disorder, weakness, moral lassitude. Passionlessly the light was sweeping all this, plucking out of the shadow one by one the detestable details. It stole toward the right wall, fell upon a cot, and from it there emerged a white little form that came hesitatingly to him. It was Magdalena, the child, the sister of Maria. "She had been with them long. But now, suddenly, her presence there, in that atmosphere of sin, struck him with a great shock. "'Back,' he whispered; 'back to bed, chiquita; it's time to be sleeping.' "But she wanted something--a lock of his hair. Maria had one; she wanted one also. "He remembered that she had asked this before, with childish insistence. He had not given much attention to it. And really, in all probability, it was mere childish whim. But now the thing staggered him, like something monstrous. Who could tell what there was in the mind of that child, with great wonder-eyes open to the shamelessness of his life. He chided her harshly and sent her scampering back to her bed. "Then, turning his back upon the room, upon all this sordid misery, he looked out upon the waters. And a ship, a white army transport, was coming in. Slowly it glided between the ghostlike silhouettes of vessels at anchor; it turned ponderously; there was a splash of phosphorescence at the bow, a running clang of chain through hawse. He did not know what that craft held for him, ah, no! You know, don't you? He did not; but suddenly his whole spiritual being tugged within him, sprang back the long, solitary path of the ship, back across the moonlit bay, past Corregidor, out into the sea, along the foamy track, back miles in thousands to a harder, cleaner land, to a little California town embowered in scented hills, and it threw itself at the feet of a girl--the girl he had left among the roses, whose eyes could read into his soul.