He reached Tientsin late at night, asked at the desk for the Doctor, and was taken upstairs at once, a boy leading the way. Several knocks brought no reply from within. At the desk again it was reported that no one had observed Dr. Ti Kung to leave the hotel—that his key was gone, that it might be well for the visitor to sit down and wait. Romney had his bags taken to a room. It was midnight. For an hour the messenger from the Gobi sat rigid as an Oriental. It was not through effort or tension—this stillness of the American’s. He had learned how to wait. He kept his back straight and his hands and head still, because he forgot them and turned his thoughts within, quite as if he sat in meditation upon a mat of _kusa_ grass. He had to protect himself from the preying of the city—from sounds and odours and the shatteringly low vibration of massed human beings out of peace with each other. He had come from the silences, which he had mastered. He fell into the very deeps of himself, deeper than the desert mission and the cause of the Big Three, to an area where Anna Erivan alone could reach. For thirty days he had been apart from her. Sometimes he felt, as now, that it was too great a wonder ever to come into her presence again, at least on earth where perfections are not by any means guaranteed. He felt that such a mating enforces in the human mind the sense that mystic love goes on and on.... Yet his eyes stung often with the thought of being with her again—if not on desert-sands, anywhere with the good brown earth under their feet. He loved her spirit, felt some miraculous union with it; but he loved her step beside, her movement in the house, the touch of her hand and the lift of her breast; loved her lips and eyes, loved the dream of a child of her body and soul. From the beginning to the end (sitting rigid near the desk of the Nestor) he went through the precious scenes of his romance—all the words and pictures, the meeting, the Forward Room, the hyenas, the kiss and the quest, the cots and the cross, the camels and Rajananda’s coming, the desert and the dream of a child, the desert-men and the thonged stakes, until that moment of horror—separation—that would never subside. This last invariably shook him back to the dull drag of earth again. It was the litany of a lover. When he looked at the clock it was one in the morning. He went to his room, leaving word for Dr. Ti Kung to call him if an interview was advisable before morning.... Romney felt himself fixing for a sleepless night. There was a curious heat in his heart at the thought of meeting Nifton Bend again. Was he in Tientsin? Would Ti Kung take him to Merchant’s Square and the house of Minglapo in the morning? Where was Ti Kung to-night? Perhaps some call to conference at the dais—perhaps the Doctor had given up hope of his arriving to-night.