In his own quarters, on the second day, he drew forth the frayed and soiled chiffon waist, washed it carefully and put it back in his breast. It was no more than a handkerchief. It had seen him through strange days and roads. He was the least maudlin of men, but the little fabric meant something striking and imperishable in his nature—something of him no longer, but around him. She was not _the woman_, but she had made the picture of what a woman could be. The farther from her, the more he appreciated. She had known in two weeks what it had taken him nearly a year to find out—that they were not for each other. The change had come to him from the months in the Drift—something to break his unparalleled infatuation. All her wonder and daring and splendour remained clear, and yet the terrible draw of her had somehow eased upon his heart. In a word, he saw as quite true another of her sayings—that love can never be on one side alone in a great romance. Late the fifth afternoon of his stay in the house of Minglapo, Romney got the first inkling of the real business at hand. There had been talk at the dais for several moments, when the old master turned at the soft swinging of one of the shop’s rear doors, and without finishing the sentence on his tongue, remarked: "And now, Friend Romney, you are ready to meet a countryman of yours, General Nifton Bend—" Very low in the doorway appeared that long, sad, strange face, and again the leap in Romney’s breast and the impulse to hurry forward and help the Hunchback to the cushions. At the same time—a hot thrill for an unemotional man—the thought that his association with Ti Kung and Minglapo meant association with Nifton Bend, the genius of Young China. At the moment of the General’s entrance from the rear, the servants had sprung to the main door opening on Merchant’s Square, closed and barred it as if for the night, though the afternoon was not entirely spent. The servants of the shop were banished and the three sat down together.... Romney’s mind had rushed back not only to his first meeting in the native professor’s house in the Congrou district of Peking, but to Longstruth’s where his impressions of that brief former interview became vivid and animate again for the listening of Moira Kelvin. The Hunchback seemed to bring again something of her almost as intimate as her perfume.... Daylight did not reach them now. The dead expressionless look had come again to the General’s eyes. Romney felt his own face turn bloodless under the second appraisal, as was the other’s in the warm gathering dusk. The unhasting and uninflected voice spoke again—the voice of a man with a single purpose, a man so close to the end that he laughs at pain. The words came slow and steadily, like running water: