"This is a medicine shop," Mah-li told her. "One of the famous medicine shops of China. I take Chinese medicines always. I am afraid of foreign doctors." "I hope you are not ill." "I have a pain here that comes and goes, especially after I have eaten a big meal." And Mah-li, opening her cape, laid her hand wistfully over a section of her green satin coat. "Dear me, I hope it is not serious." The place was full of a pungent but stale medicinal odor as unfamiliar as the flavor of Chinese dishes; it suggested roots and herbs brewed a long time in ancient pots. In the close air of the place it was overpowering. They crossed an open court where Megan stopped to admire the intricate carving of the woodwork, angles of temples and pavilions, all smothered in dense foliage, from which peered tiny faces of men and animals, smiling from a serene secret world. Inside the next building a clerk brought her a high blackwood stool, where she sat while Mah-li made her purchases. For the pain that came after a large dinner she was apparently buying all the drugs in China. A clerk figured up her account on an abacus. "Would you like to see more of the shop?" asked Mah-li. Megan said yes, though she was giddy and tired. She followed Mah-li into more rooms and across more courts, where unexpected sunlight cut through the gloom in blue smoky shafts. At the end of a tunnel-like passage Megan sniffed amid all the dead odors a sudden drift of musk, savage and alive. In the court beyond were wooden barred cages along the walls, in which large deer stood amid heaps of dirty straw, looking out with beautiful eyes full of fear and a certain disdain. "Oh, I love them!" She leaned against the bars, but they were quite wild, they would not come to her hand stretched confidingly toward them. "I hope they are not going to kill them." But no one answered her and turning she saw Mah-li had left. She looked across the open court where coolies, naked to the waist, pounded something in a mortar, and saw in the dusk behind them the satin gleam of Mah-li's collar. Megan did not know whether to join her or not. She made several further attempts to attract the deer and turning was about to follow Mah-li when she saw that a man was with her. They were so absorbed in what they said to each other that distance condensed heavily between her and them and they seemed to stand unattainably far. She stopped abruptly, and waiting, listened to the low murmur of their unknown words. Presently they separated and their heads, bowed in the repeated noddings of a ceremonious farewell, were caught for a moment and illumined by a common shaft of sunlight. Their delicate faces, their narrow eyes fixed on each other in a locked and grave attention, glowed like those of marionette lovers in a fairy play. Mah-li's companion was the exquisite apparition who had brought Megan the cigarettes and Shanghai papers.