Bob went to China and was not able to send for her as soon as they had both expected. A long summer dragged past and autumn came. Megan, still happy but a little less exultant, tried to do settlement work in the small city where she lived, a city where the prosperity of the inhabitants made such work among them so difficult, so desultory, that she gave it up. In the early winter she went to a hospital in Boston as a probationer. But she was not a success. The external ugliness of the life depressed her, and her imaginative pity for the worst cases, added to an irresistible physical disgust, was such that she became fumbling and even absent as to detail. The patients themselves did not like to have her about. This discouraged her, and when her mother on a visit found her more than ordinarily hollow-cheeked, with eyes over-brilliant from strain, she promptly took her home. So a gradual depression began to settle over her. Her impulses did not change but there was no outlet for them. She thought a great deal of China. She read Bob's letters over and over and out of their bare words extracted gradually a vision of China's wretchedness and beauty. China and Bob both needed her, but Bob was now an accepted fact, dear, a part almost of herself, while China was unknown; it put no limits on her imagination. And China held the greater magic. Then in January came a letter saying that conditions in China had grown suddenly worse; Bob gave them details that at this distance lost their significance. The British at Hankow, the Nationalists, Russian influence, all this meant nothing. Still, Megan's parents were worried. It did mean another delay. As they sat about together, Megan reading parts of the letter aloud, she suddenly felt that another crisis had come to her, like that one when she looked in the mirror and for the first time saw there a long pale face that was her own. If she could not get to China now, and to Bob, it seemed that something terrible and definite would happen to her. She did not define it, but it seemed vaguely to take the character of a loss of faith. It cast her into a panic. Looking up she saw her father and mother watching her with a common expression of anxiety on their faces. She knew by instinct that some peculiar quality of their love for her made them vulnerable, in a way that she was not, and abruptly, without reasoning, she stormed over their weakness. She burst into tears. "But I've got to go," she cried. "I can't stand these disappointments any longer, I've got to go." And as she knew at once, even without looking at them, that she had won, a feeling of release streamed over her. [Illustration: Chapter III headpiece] CHAPTER III When the Jacksons returned for tea she told them all about the wrecked car, which they said they had seen as they came in, and particularly about the extreme callousness of the owner of the car. Mr. Jackson did not seem to think that was anything out of the ordinary.