He waited an instant. The surgeon was uncomfortably silent. "Dr. Gray," the Manchu insisted, "of what did Dreghorn die?" "If you want to know, and have the right to know," Gray burst out savagely, "the man died because he had contracted the most virulent case of leprosy I have ever seen in the tropics. How he did it, God only knows. He was quite well when he left New York except for a rash on his left hand. He must have been impregnated with some horrible virus. In a few days I had to manacle him in his cabin. For a week the man was a shrieking maniac. I thought something might be done when we got to port. There was no chance. In Algiers they would have put him in the leper colony. So one night I took him up to the boat-deck and let him go overboard." There was an instant's silence. "I knew of the man," the doctor said bitterly, "and I can't even pray to God for his soul!" "But I must!" said Li Sin. "You will go up and see Miss Johns," the surgeon reminded him. "She will get over it." "She will get over it, and be happy, and marry a good man," the Manchu told him. "I will go to see her." And they parted. He went upstairs to his apartment, very slowly, very calmly. He sat down and thought for a while. Softly he clapped his hands. The silent Cantonese came. "Hong Kop," he asked, "tell me, Hong Kop, you who are young, how does love come?" In fluting, sibilant Cantonese the servant answered: "There is beauty," he said, "and it calls to manliness with the call of cymbals. They meet and wing upward, as Chung Tzu wrote, 'like a hymn recited softly at the death of day.'" "There is beauty, and there is manliness!" the Manchu mused. "There is Irene Johns, and there is--" He smiled an instant, and became as grave as ever again. "You will go to Brooklyn, to the Navy Yard, Hong Kop, and you will find for me an ensign called Nelson. You will find where he is, Hong Kop.... "I am getting old, Hong Kop, I am getting old. The pear gardens of Tientsin are bursting into silver and mauve. Birds from the outer sea are winging northward. Again with the spring the musicians tune their lutes of jade. The throbbing chords do not awaken me, Hong Kop. Hong Kop, I am old." He rose wearily. "Call the gray limousine, Hong Kop," he directed, "and then go on your errand." He stretched his arms out for his fur coat, but suddenly he remembered something. He went upstairs to the glass-roofed laboratory; taking a parcel from a bronze chest, and unwrapping the antiseptic-soaked coverings, he brought out a book, a broad, thin book, the stiff parchment pages of which were edged with gold. Carefully he lighted the muffle-furnace, and carefully he placed the volume in it. And while he waited for the volume to be consumed, softly he began to recite a quatrain from it, a quatrain of Ling Tai Fu's: