"Nifton Bend’s eyes were lingering warmly upon me again. I felt zeal for service under him, but I was tied up for the time being. Yes, it was as if I had found a master. In coming into his presence, I had touched the inner circle. He spoke of China and Japan, a low uninflected English, and then of America—how he had left her because there was no play of his powers in America—how the States seemed to him tranced in trifles—yet how he loved the States. Presently he said that we were destined to meet again—and I knew that the audience was finished." "Where is he now?" Moira Kelvin asked. "In Peking—at least, he is never far from the centre of things, and that is Peking." They were silent some time and then the woman spoke: "You have told me a story of yourself—by talking about China and another man.... Take me back to the hotel, Sir Romney, I will see you to-morrow. Come to me at noon if you like. It has been a good day—thanks to you. I’m glad to know you better and better. It sounds cold—but perhaps some time you’ll know what that means. I am a little mad to-night.... I seem to feel old China in her new birth—moist and craving like the big gray moth—her mate not yet come—and this Hunchback whom you are destined to meet again—" *4* It was a whirlwind fortnight at Hankow. Romney was game, rather big game, for a questing beauty a-wing around the world. His soul had been asleep to her kind of magic. She touched him awake. His education and many attitudes towards life were torn down and rebuilt. There was a furious lover in the man, and serious weaknesses that had never been tested before. Though he did not acknowledge, and perhaps was not aware of the fact, he had been in his own way a terrific worker. The passions of his life, in a single day, had been turned from his tasks to Moira Kelvin. She had to be a rather splendid creature to take gracefully the full tumult from such a man’s heart, but this was her genius. Romney’s woman matters heretofore had been sundry and discursive. She took his all and was not filled. No other pressure could be brought to bear upon a man to make him greater, to make him surpass himself, than an encounter with a woman who could contain him at his highest force, and still have an aching void to spare.