Megan lay looking idly at the frontispiece which gradually caught her attention. It was an old steel engraving of a Jesuit church in a Chinese city the name of which was unfamiliar to her. All round the church were curving Chinese roofs, laden with preposterous porcelain figures, over garden walls sprouted fantasies of unknown trees and before it were set small swarming figures of coolies bearing yokes, beggars with their bowls, ladies with parasols, and the sedan-chairs of the rich. In the midst of all this, the Jesuit church lifted its flat façade, broken half-way by two orderly volutes, with half-dimensional, twisted pillars on either side of its doors. The suggestion of the grandiose and the gigantic was discreetly tempered by reflections of logic, of Aristotle and the sciences, and the inappropriateness of the whole to its surroundings lent it a delicious perversity and charm. A Jesuit façade in China. The first small wedge in the breach which was to grow wider and wider till all Europe poured in, no longer, alas, the Europe of amiable sophistries and the art of making clocks, but a vast and terrible lava flow of artillery, transportation, oil, steel-girded buildings, sanitation, jazz, democracy, equality of the sexes, business efficiency and the true word of God. [Illustration: Chapter V headpiece] CHAPTER V On one of those blue and white days that sometimes come as a voluptuous relief in the midst of rain, and at about noon, the city was taken. Mrs. Jackson and Megan spent the morning in small shops along the Rue du Consulat looking for jade to send to Megan's mother. The small streets running between the Rue du Consulat and the Rue des Deux Republiques, which is Chinese territory, ended in grilles, and they were further guarded by barbed-wire entanglements and chevaux-de-frise. At intervals along the Rue du Consulat were redoubts of sand-bags guarded by French Marines, and as Megan and Mrs. Jackson walked along the sidewalks crowded with Chinese, they passed, every hundred yards or so, groups of Annamites under French officers slowly patrolling. Among the usual flutter of banners, red, white and yellow outside the shops, were a great number of Nationalist flags, red with a white sun on a blue field. "See," said Mrs. Jackson, pointing to them, "they know the city is going to fall and they have turned already." But they themselves did not know it had fallen until they reached home about noon to find the telephone ringing. Mr. Jackson was calling. "The Cantonese have taken over the Native City and the railroad station," he said. "I think you had better stay indoors until we see if anything further is going to happen." Megan thought there must be some mistake. "But do cities fall like this?" she asked. "I have not even heard a shot." Mrs. Jackson said: "Now I guess Miss Reed will be sorry she did not move out of Chapei." "Maybe she was right after all and there is no danger." "We'll see," said Mrs. Jackson.