To Rocky, the most elusive memory of all this eventful night was the conversation with Miss Hui Fei. For she returned in a moment--so he remembered it--and sank wearily into the steamer chair. The picture of that scene was to vary bafflingly in his mind. At times he saw himself, torn with an emotion now so great that it seemed the end of life, standing over her, saying, passionately: “I know how it looked--you're finding us here like that! And you'd have reason. I did flirt with her. I'm ashamed now. I hadn't seen you--felt you--like this. But that's all over. I was telling her--Please! You've got to know!--that I love you. Or telling her enough. She understood. And she was awfully decent. She took my hand, wished me luck.” There must have been a brief time then when the poor girl was endeavoring pleasantly to turn aside this torrent of heavily freighted words. Certainly he was talking feverishly on. He could remember pulling down a coil of rope from the steersman's deck and sitting moodily beside her; and there was a sensation in their minds, his and hers, of being at cross-purposes. There was something about her, back of the weary smile--a smile that was long to haunt him, dim in the moonlight, exquisite in its sensitive beauty--that eluded his pressing desire until it seemed near to driving him mad. Kipling's _East is East, and West is West_, slipped in among his thoughts; kept coming and coming until it became a nerve-wracking singsong in his brain. There was one period, fortunately very short, when he seemed to be almost forcing a quarrel. Why, he couldn't afterward imagine. That part of it was dreadful in the retrospect. He had reached the point, apparently, when he couldn't longer endure the failure to reach her. There was simply no response. It was almost as if he were frightening her away. Perhaps it was just that. But the most vivid memory was of the unaccountable force that suddenly rose in him, seizing on his tongue, his brain, his very nerves. The power of the Kanes was abruptly his, and it brought its own skill with it. It was, distinctly, a possession. It simply came, at this very top of his emotional pitch. There must have been preliminaries. He must have said things that she must have answered. But these lesser moments dropped out. Even a day later, he could see, could almost feel, himself on one knee beside the steamer chair, saying those amazing things, without a shred of memory as to how he got there. Never had he so spoken, to girl or woman; for in the escapades of the younger Rocky there had always been a reticence if seldom a restraint. It was precocity; the blood that was in him.