The car jerked forward before Megan could answer. [Illustration: Chapter VIII headpiece] CHAPTER VIII They entered the Concession at the Avenue Joffre and drove down it at tremendous speed. At this hour it was empty of people, and seen in the half-darkness and misty rain, it looked like any street in an American suburb except that at the corner under the lights stood the motionless Annamites in their peaked hats, as sinisterly irrelevant as if they were part of a bad dream. They turned into the winding Avenue Foch, which marked the boundary between the French Concession and the International Settlement. At the Bund they showed their passes, a green laissez-passer from the French Commandant of the Defense and a slip of typed paper from the Shanghai Defense Force, and entered the International Settlement. They passed along the Bund under the staring eyes of the war-ships and crossed Soochow Creek at the Garden Bridge, where they again showed their passes to Marines from the _Blas de Lezo_. They turned left along the creek, up North Szechuen Road and into Range Road. It became a longer ride than Megan had expected. Once or twice Doctor Strike leaned back and said a few words, but it was so obviously to give the illusion of a casual ride that she did not bother to play up to it. She was too intensely preoccupied. The sudden opening of a channel for her energy and will made her a little giddy. And this giddiness, this feeling of an uncontrollably quickening rhythm, mounted alarmingly. Megan tried to put a check on it by holding up for examination each fragment of sensation as it passed. But everything remained as blurred as it had been before. She was only sure of that released energy flowing strongly and now so inevitably forward. This release gave an amazing sense of freedom, for a moment too vertiginous a freedom. The exquisite poise of free will in the midst of the ordered progress of the will of God seemed to have been jarred, suddenly to vary wildly. Megan jerked it sharply back. She sat staring at the back of Doctor Strike's head. He wore no hat and his great bony skull was flanked by two prominent ears. His ears were vaguely and irritatingly amusing. That was because they were so obviously a vulnerable mechanism. What a long way from the flawless intrepidity of the Doctor's spirit to the imperfection of those ears. It is with instruments such as these that we go armed. Megan was overcome by their inadequacy, she found them lamentable and all at once heroic, as though they stood for all of our weakness, for our glory.