He found himself in the corridor; walked slowly, uncertainly, up to the deck; sat by the rail and, head on hand, moodily watched the river and the hills. He asked himself if he had, by his very silence, struck a bargain with the girl; but could find no answer to the question, only bewilderment. Could it be that she was only a daring thief? It could, of course, but how to get at the truth? Abruptly, then his thoughts turned inward. His wild days had seemed, since his change of heart, of the remote past; but they were not, they had still been the stuff of his life within about a week. It was unnerving. He thought, something morbidly, as the sensitive young will, about habits.... The day had gone awry, too, in the matter of his love. A reaction had set in. Hui Fei was keeping much to herself. It had become difficult to talk with her at all. And that had bewildered him.... He was all adrift, with neither sound training nor a mature philosophy to steady him, life had turned unreal on his hands; nothing was real--not Hui or her father, certainly not himself, not even Mr. Doane. His background, even, was slipping away, and with it his sense of the white race. This, it seemed, was a yellow world--swarming, heedless, queerly tragic. His soul was adrift, and nobody cared. Toward his father and mother he felt only bitterness. There were, it appeared, no friends. He thought, it seemed, confusedly, excitedly, of everything; of everything except the important fact that he was very young. Early on the following morning Doane found the little princess playing about the deck, and with a smile seated himself beside her. She settled at once on his knee, chattering brightly in the Mandarin tongue of her play world. He responded with a note of good-humored whimsy not out of key with her alert clear imagination. It was pleasant to fall again into the little intimacies of the language that had become, during these twenty years and more, almost his own. He pointed out to her the trained cormorants diving for fish, and the irrigating wheels along the banks; and then told quaint stories--of the first water buffalo, and of the magic rice-field. Soon she, too, was telling stories--of the simpleton who bought herons for ducks, of the toad in the lotus pool, of the child that was born in a conch shell and finally crawled with it into the sea, of the youngest daughter who to save the life of her father married a snake, of the magic melon that grew full of gold and the other melon that contained hungry beggars, of the two small boys and the moon cake, and of the curious beginning of the ant species.