There had been little sleep for either of them on the junk. When they climbed aboard the crew had stared at them stupid and insolent, paying no attention to Mr. Shultz's demands to see the laodah. But Mr. Shultz had gone boldly aft, followed by Megan, and for long moments she had listened to his voice, now creamy with persuasion, now breaking into sharp spattering threats. Finally, under pressure of a roll of bills and a Mauser nestling against his ribs, the old Chinaman by the tiller had given in. Three or four of his crew manned the capstan to weigh anchor, singing a strange broken song, others sheeted home the sail that had been idly slatting in the wind. Presently Megan heard the slap of water against the blunt bow. When they were well under way, Mr. Shultz led Megan into the cabin so that she might stretch out on one of the bunks, but she only stood a moment inside the door, looking hopelessly through the thick air at the hostile eyes of the Chinese women, at the babies on the floor, the ducks and fish hung against the bulkhead, the shrine at one end, smelled the mixed odor of hot rancid grease, opium and incense, and staggered out again. Mr. Shultz rolled his coat up for her, and she lay cold and desperately seasick, flat on the deck near the tiller. At last day broke underneath the world and light began slowly to flood the sky with ripples of light from below, crossed by flying wedges of birds. The sun came and tormented her all day, its direct fire searching under her eyelids. By mid-afternoon they reached the mouth of the shallow river, too late, Mr. Shultz told her, for the flood tide, so they hung for hours, swaying giddily between the two blazing mirrors of sea and sky. The women did their cooking, smoke curled from the vent hole in the cabin, and the laodah had a game of mah jong with two of the more decorative of them. Fish were caught. A baby wailed. The delay was of no importance. Gradually the two mirrors dimmed and burnished again into crimson. Night came. The world for Megan became the cycle of day and night. Endless. Then out of emptiness she heard water under the bow again. It was very early in the morning, still dark, when they came to the junk anchorage off the low-built city. Mr. Shultz called a sampan, that like an unsubstantial water insect carried them under the shadowy hulls of the junks to the Bund, where a small coast steamer lay waiting as squat and respectable as a boarding house. In the basin-stand of the cabin was a cake of fresh pink soap. Megan, holding it to her nose, smelled Europe once more and fell over on the transom for a few hours of troubled sleep.