So the night wore away until the first red bars of morning light gleamed beyond the hill, and seemed to emulate the dying embers of the devastated settlement. M’liss for the first time began to think of the home she had quitted the night before, and looked with some anxiety in the direction of “Mountain Ranch.” Its white walls and little orchard were untouched, and looked peacefully over the blackened and deserted village. M’liss rose, and, stretching her cramped limbs, walked briskly toward the town. She had proceeded but a short distance when she heard the sound of cautious and hesitating footsteps behind her, and, facing quickly about, encountered the figure of Waters. “Are you drunk?” said M’liss passionately, “or what do you mean by this nonsense?” The man approached her with a strange smile on his face, rubbing his hands together, and shivering as with cold. When he had reached her side he attempted to take her hand. M’liss shrank away from him with an expression of disgust. “What are you doing here again?” she demanded. “I want to go with you. It’s dark in there,” he said, motioning to the wood he had just quitted, “and I don’t like to be alone. You’ll let me be with you, won’t you? I won’t be any trouble;” and a feeble smile flickered on his lips. M’liss darted a quick look into his face. The grim outlines of his mouth were relaxed, and his lips moved again impotently. But his eyes were bright and open,—bright with a look that was new to M’liss—that imparted a strange softness and melancholy to his features,—the incipient gleam of insanity! CHAPTER VIII THE AUTHOR TO THE READER—EXPLANATORY If I remember rightly, in one of the admirable tragedies of Tsien Tsiang at a certain culminating point of interest an innocent person is about to be sacrificed. The knife is raised and the victim meekly awaits the stroke. At this moment the author of the play appears on the stage, and, delivering an excellent philosophical dissertation on the merits of the “situation,” shows that by the purest principles of art the sacrifice is necessary, but at the same time offers to the audience the privilege of changing the denouement. Such, however, is the nice aesthetic sense of a Chinese auditory, and so universal the desire of bloodshed in the heathen breast, that invariably at each representation of this remarkable tragedy the cause of humanity gives way to the principles of art.