Megan slept heavily and as she came slowly out of unconsciousness she checked off one by one the familiar sounds of the yamen, the farmyard crow of the roosters, the soft thud of barefooted soldiers drilling in the outer court, the ringing of the telephone and the voice of the young orderly. Already these sounds meant a routine of life. She lay in bed all morning and toward noon asked her amah for a hot bath. Presently she heard the coolie carrying pails of water and emptying them in a robin's-egg blue Soochow tub that stood in a little bath closet off her room. She listened, thinking how much labor each intervaled splash had cost and wondering at the simplicity of Eastern life. In this yamen of the General she had seen no sign of luxury or magnificence. It was a house obviously made for a life which began and ended with the rising and the setting of the sun. Early in the evening she had heard a click of tiles from the kitchen court in the rear, where some of the servants played mah jong, but that had soon stopped and by ten o'clock the yamen became a collection of dimly lighted rooms where people slept. Even the group at the poker game had an air of enforced wakefulness, like children kept up at a railroad station. After her bath Megan sat down before Mah-li's little dressing-case and brushed her hair into lacquered smoothness. Then she examined the case and the lipsticks and eye-pencils it contained. She gave a slow experimental stroke to her lips and, daring further, touched her face with some of the pallid almond powder, put a faint touch of blue on her lids. Her eyes stood out startlingly in a face of luminous skin, of subtle transparent shadow; she saw that whatever the cause she was changed, something had heightened, intensified, she was once more beautiful. Her eyes caught Mah-li's rings lying where she had left them. She picked them up to examine the jade more closely. For all their high polish they gave back very little light, rather light sank in them and was lost; they retained obstinately their perfection of green. Megan put them on her thin fingers so that when she saw Mah-li she would have them ready to slip into her hand. While she waited for more food, for something, it did not matter much what, to happen, she stroked her lips fastidiously with the lipstick, looking at herself, gratified by her appearance and by her gesture, which was like a movement in a steady pantomime.