Deane, indeed, forced himself to consider the boy dispassionately. The wild oats of any spoiled youth with too much money at his disposal, if brought together, and closely scrutinized, would make an appalling showing. Wild young men did, of course, recover. There was in this boy a note of intensity--passionate, eager--that was by no means all egotism. And there was in the father a hard sort of character that had proved itself indomitable, and that must be taken into account. Yes, it was a simple fact, that many a young fellow had gone farther wrong than had Rocky Kane without wrecking his adult life. You couldn't tell. And there they were, the eager moody boy and the lovely girl, who was oddly, quaintly conspicuous in her opera wrap, sitting very close, talking in low tones while he walked alone. It was torture.... yet it wras an awakening. He told himself that it was better so... Pacing back and forth, dwelling on the quick changeableness of youth, its ardor and sensitive hopefulness, he thought--reaching out for fellowship as will always the hurt soul--of other lonely lives, of Abelard and Jean Valjean, of St. Francis, even of Christ. It was odd--from his present philosophical position of something near Taoism he felt the legendary Christ as a profoundly human and friendly spirit, immeasurably more tender, finer, gentler than the theological structure of thought and conduct that had been erected in His name. He had thought himself very nearly around the circle, back to essential good.... This process could bring only humility. Life began to matter less. Love was a tormenting problem of self; the mature soul must in some measure attain selflessness if it were not to go down in the trampled dust of life. Worldly success was an accident. It was hardly desirable; hardly mattered. That he had within the hour pinned his hope to money, fairly fought for it, began to seem incredible. The viceroy found him standing quietly by the river, turning from the slowly dying fire out there to the slowly spreading glow in the eastern sky. “I like to think,” remarked his excellency, smiling in friendly fashion, “that when the first Buddhist patriarch, Bodhidharma, miraculously crossed the river on a reed plucked from the southern bank, it was not far from here, near my home.” “Was not your city of Huang Chau the home of Li To?” asked Doane. “Indeed, yes!” cried his excellency. “In some of his excursions on the river he undoubtedly passed the site of my home.” Doane quoted from that most famous of rhapsodists in musical Chinese: “'One who has hearkened to the waters roaring down from the heights of Lung, and faint voices from the land of Ch'in; one who has listened to the cries of monkeys on the shores of the Yangtze Kiang and the songs of the land of Pa'.... That”--he was musing aloud, reflectively as the Chinese do--“was written three full centuries before William of Normandy first set foot on British soil.... Li Po so described himself.”