It was a small, thin volume printed in 1884 by some mission press in Calcutta and it was called _A Noble Life_. Megan looked through its yellow pages and saw it was an account of the life of Archibald Alexander McPherson, who left the British army to engage in mission work in India. As Megan read here and there to see if she might discover what had been the force that had driven him to do this, she came on sentences like these: "He became more and more sensitive to sin. On one occasion he corrected his native boy for some fault with more sharpness than he afterwards deemed necessary and when he became convinced that he had given away, even in a slight degree, to anger, he called his servant and falling on his knees begged his forgiveness with tears of contrition." Megan looked up at Mrs. Jackson with astonishment. She now pictured her on her knees before the number one boy, begging his forgiveness with tears of contrition. And even Megan smiled. Mrs. Jackson and Archibald Alexander McPherson both had a knowledge, perhaps equally unerring, of their own needs, and Mrs. Jackson was not to be diverted by any pleasing fantasies she might profess; she remained untroubled by such mystic pressures as tormented Archibald Alexander McPherson. As Megan sat pretending to read, the telephone rang again. It turned out to be a young naval officer she had met on the boat whose name was Bates. He wished to take her to dinner. She had not particularly liked him but after a slight hesitation said yes. She explained him to Mrs. Jackson as a pleasant sort of fellow who had come out to command a gunboat and would leave the next day for up-river. Mrs. Jackson did not understand why an engaged girl wanted to dine with another man, especially on Sunday. "I'm really not endangering my future happiness. And certainly I ought to begin to know something of China." "I don't think the wife of a mission worker needs to know the China that a gunboat commander is going to show her." "Are they so dreadful?" asked Megan, smiling. "I think they're pretty loose in their morals, though there was a nice one evacuated us out of Shasi." Lieutenant-Commander Bates took her first to the Palace, where they could sit and watch the lights of the war-ships anchored along the Bund,--English, French, Dutch, Italian, Japanese and American. Megan looked at the American cruiser with pride. More than any of the others, of course, it contained steel, discipline, honor, handsome men and sudden death. "Have a cocktail," said Bates. "Thanks, I believe I'll have a glass of sherry." "Better have a cocktail. I knew by your voice over the telephone that you thought you should not come. I see by your face you wish now you hadn't. Suppose you be as reckless as you can and I'll be as careful as I can and perhaps we'll strike a mean."