Because he was, at least, the bird in hand, she submitted passively when his fingers found hers under the steamer rug. Twilight was thickening into night now on the river. And they were in a dim corner. He was, she saw, at the point of almost utter disorganization. He was sensitive, emotional, quite spoiled. It was almost too easy to do what she might choose with him. It would be amusing to tantalize him, if there were time; watch him struggle in the net of his own nervously unripe emotions, perhaps shake him down (we are yet again dropping into her phraseology) without the surrender of a _quid pro quo_. That would please her sense of cool sharp power. But he might in that event, like the young naval officer down at Hong Kong, shoot himself; which wouldn't do. No, nothing in that! This other larger matter, now, was a problem indeed; really, as yet, only a haze in her sensitive, strangely gifted mind. It put to the test at once her imagination, her instinct for dangerous enterprise, her skill at organizing the sluggish minds of others. It would mean dangerous and intense activity. She asked, in a careless manner, where the viceroy kept his treasures; and fixed in her mind the place he named--Huang Chau. The fool was squeezing her fingers now; unquestionably building in his ungoverned brain an extravagant image of herself; an image wrapped in veils of somewhat tarnished but certainly boyish innocence, sentimentalized, curiously less interesting than the complicated wickedness and intrigue of actual human life as it presented itself to her. When he tried to kiss her she left him. But lingered to listen to his proposal that she should follow him to his own cabin; smiled enigmatically in the dusk beneath the deck light; humming lightly, pleasingly, she moved away; turned to watch him bolting for his room. She strolled around the deck then. Apparently none other was sitting out. The teachers and the young men were spending the evening, she knew, with Dawley Kane at the consulate. Rocky had got out of that. Tex Connor was in his cabin; reading, doubtless, with his one good eye. For rough as he might be, this gambler and promoter of boxing and wrestling reveled secretly in love stories. He read them by the hundred, the old-fashioned paper-covered romances and tales of adventure. A pretty able man. Tex; useful in certain sorts of undertakings; certainly useful now; but with that curious romantic strain--a weakness, she felt. And a difficult man, strong, arrogant, leaning on crude power and threats where she leaned on delicately adjusted intrigue. Had Tex known better how to cover his various trails he would be in New York or London now, not out here on the coast picking up small change. Approaching him would be a bit of a problem; for a year or so their ways, hers and his, had lain far apart. It was not known, here on the boat, that they were so much as casually acquainted. They bowed at the dining table; nothing more.