“But you're--I don't understand! Here we are--like this--and you shoo me out. I don't even know your first name.” “My name is Dixie--but I don't want you to call me that.” “Why not? We're friends, aren't we--” “Of course, but they'd hear you.” “Oh!” “Wait--I'll look before you go.... It's all clear now.” They visited long after dinner. He was brimming with later advices from the center of trouble up the river. Mostly she listened, studying him with a mind that was keener and quicker and shrewder in its sordid wisdom than he would perhaps ever understand. Everything that Kato had told his father and himself he passed eagerly on to her. He was a man indeed now; making an enormous impression; possessor of inside information of a vital sort--the viceroy's priceless collection of jewels, jades, porcelains and historic paintings, which Kato was advising his father to pick up for a song while red revolution raged about the old Manchu, the dramatic plans of the republicans, their emblems and a pass-word (Kato knew everything)--“Shui-li”--“union is strength”; the small meeting below decks ending in the death of two soldiers. He dramatized this last as he related it. The girl, lying still in her chair, listened as if but casually interested, while her mind gathered and related to one another the probable facts beneath his words. She was considering his dominant quality of ungoverned hot-blooded youth. Of discretion he clearly enough had none; which fact, viewed from her standpoint, was both important and dangerous. For the information he so volubly conveyed she had immediate use. That was settled, however cloudy the details. But this further question as to the advisability of holding the boy personally to herself she was still weighing. Two courses of action lay before her, each leading to a possible rich prize. If the two could be combined, well and good; she would pursue both. But it was not easy to sense out a possible combination. The obvious first thought was to go whole-heartedly after the larger of the prizes and as whole-heartedly forget the other. As usual in all such choices, however, the lesser prize was the easier to secure. Perhaps, even, by working--the word “working” was her own--with great rapidity she might make--again her word--a killing with this wild youth in time to discard him and pursue the still richer prize.