Romney threw back his head and laughed at the upper arch of tiles, his arms held out. It was the laugh of a man who stands on the rim of the last ditch.... He had certainly sifted to the bottom of things. The _John Dividend_ was the last of many ships. He had made the grand traverse of the Asiatic coast from the Yellow Sea to the Bay of Bengal and doubled back to Shanghai. This drink-thing was the great weakness he had uncovered. Three days after her steamer had gone down the river, he had fallen into the low eddies of it—a cheap thing, but he felt cheap. He saw that he had always been intoxicated somehow. A turn of a card and he might have become a saint instead of a drunkard. Mother China had intoxicated him first; then the woman. It was all a matter of temperament. Having lost the levitation of cleanness and strength, he had permitted the mother-force of gravitation to take her certain course. From Longstruth’s at Hankow he had swirled into the great drift of the water-fronts—deserters, remittance-men, hangovers from every form of human failure. He had spent everything he had within reach—a large amount of money. He had learned the value of money when his pockets flattened to a few thin coins. There was a large slice of his fortune left in Peking, but it was so placed that he would have to go there to get it. He was on the way back now. In fact the _John Dividend_ would have taken him almost there—she was booked for Tientsin—but had been too stagnant and stenchy in her bowels. The fact is he would never have reached Manila and the deck of the _John Dividend_ except for this new something, superlatively fine in his physique. Altogether he had seen a lot of life with the integument off—and had expected little more of the late days than to be found dead somewhere.... The scent of the fountain-place had a certain whipping magic about it. It seemed to cleanse away some weakness. It made Moira Kelvin draw close in memory, but there was a queer up-pull to it now, as if she said: "_You have played enough, Sir Romney. Give it up—you’re too clean-blooded to die soiled. You don’t want me. You’ve forgotten for days at a time what you are trying to kill yourself for. If that next daybreak had found me in your arms—you would have hated me, and I would have had for myself something infinitely worse than hatred. You were big that night to let me go. Nature will not let a man as big as that pass out without doing his work and finding his own. If you want sin—pray, sin magnificently._"