"You said something about things as bad as possible." In a level voice she told him about her discovery of Edward Dunsack unconscious in his black wrap on the bed. "I thought he had died," she repeated almost monotonously; "he had such a yellow gone look." "But that can't be allowed!" he cried. "You mustn't see it. Indecent, worse. The beast will have to be removed. No one will hear of his staying about with two women and a fanatical old man." She was afraid that he would go into the house at once and appear with her uncle, very much in the manner of a dog with a rat. Her sense of a worldly knowledge, a philosophy of realization, far deeper than his own returned. Things couldn't be disposed of in that easy manner; it was probable that they couldn't be disposed of, righted, at all. Her mother, with her help, must continue to keep Barzil's home: there was no other place for Edward Dunsack to go. "He won't hurt us," she said vaguely. "It's principally bad for him. Then, at first, I didn't know. You get used to so much." He, Gerrit Ammidon, wouldn't have it, he asserted in a heated return of his familiar dictatorial manner. The fellow would be out of there to-morrow. It was a damned unendurable outrage! She smiled softly and laid a momentary hand on his sleeve. "That's nothing, Gerrit; nothing compared to the rest, to me." He frowned down at her out of the gloom. "What am I to do?" she asked. He again cursed Salem and the world with which he had proclaimed himself out of date and sympathy. This, while it communicated to her a certain warm comfort, resolved nothing, made no reply to her question. To-morrow offered precisely the same hopeless outlook of yesterday. No answer from Gerrit, Gerrit married, was possible. She saw that. "I'm not fit to go around on land blubbering and setting tongues to clapping," he declared. "I ought to be locked in my cabin when the ship's in port, and let out only after sail's made again." She heard a slight movement in the grass; and turning sharply caught the vague outline of a man, the thin unsubstantial shape of Edward Dunsack. He vanished immediately; Gerrit, absorbed in bitter thought, had missed him. Strangely her uncle only filled her mind with the image of China, the China that had ruined him, and which, too, in the form of a woman, a Manchu, had destroyed the hope of any acceptable existence of her own. "Great pretensions and idiotic results," he went on; "no ballast. Take what your grandfather said to me--nothing in that unexpected or to drive a man off. Yet off I go and--" he halted oddly, just as her breath was suspended at the admittance which she was certain must follow. But he fell into another glooming silence.