He enjoyed it all, and so did Pan. They were both young and light-hearted. And when the afternoon was spent, there was always that high room open to the stars, with its China bowls full of flowers and its big colored lanterns, shedding a mellow light. Sometimes there was music. A Chinese band played three evenings a week in the gilded restaurant beneath them, and the louder the gongs sounded and the fiddlers fiddled, the more delighted was Pan. Just below the restaurant was her father’s bazaar. Occasionally Mun You would stroll upstairs and inquire of the young couple if there was anything needed to complete their felicity, and Pan would answer: “Thou only.” Pan was very proud of her Chinese father. “I would rather have a Chinese for a father than a white man,” she often told Mark Carson. The last time she had said that he had asked whom she would prefer for a husband, a white man or a Chinese. And Pan, for the first time since he had known her, had no answer for him. II It was a cool, quiet evening, after a hot day. A new moon was in the sky. “How beautiful above! How unbeautiful below!” exclaimed Mark Carson involuntarily. He and Pan had been gazing down from their open retreat into the lantern-lighted, motley-thronged street beneath them. “Perhaps it isn’t very beautiful,” replied Pan, “but it is here I live. It is my home.” Her voice quivered a little. He leaned towards her suddenly and grasped her hands. “Pan,” he cried, “you do not belong here. You are white—white.” “No! no!” protested Pan. “You are,” he asserted. “You have no right to be here.” “I was born here,” she answered, “and the Chinese people look upon me as their own.” “But they do not understand you,” he went on. “Your real self is alien to them. What interest have they in the books you read—the thoughts you think?” “They have an interest in me,” answered faithful Pan. “Oh, do not speak in that way any more.” “But I must,” the young man persisted. “Pan, don’t you see that you have got to decide what you will be—Chinese or white? You cannot be both.” “Hush! Hush!” bade Pan. “I do not love you when you talk to me like that.” A little Chinese boy brought tea and saffron cakes. He was a picturesque little fellow with a quaint manner of speech. Mark Carson jested merrily with him, while Pan holding a tea-bowl between her two small hands laughed and sipped. When they were alone again, the silver stream and the crescent moon became the objects of their study. It was a very beautiful evening. After a while Mark Carson, his hand on Pan’s shoulder, sang: