In Siamese life the lights and shadows are equally strong. At once brilliant and gloomy, smiling and sombre, lighted as by the radiance of dawn, and at the same time enveloped in the darkness of night. The branding and enrolling for the day was over. The crowds dispersed to their various homes. When the young man, Nai Dhamaphat, went out, he had but one thought; it was to follow that girl, and try, if possible, to see her face and hear her voice again. There was something in that face that had changed the whole current of his being, and had set him, charged with a new force, in the midst of a little world all by itself, the horizon of which was bounded by her possible smile. He turned his steps towards the grand palace, and gazed upon the place where she was imprisoned; he was almost at the gate. He wavered in his mind; custom and his natural reserve forbade him to speak to a strange woman; with a bewildered air he retraced his steps and went home. That part of Bangkok in which Chow P'haya Mândtree lived was laid out in small squares, each walled in by low ramparts, enclosing the residence and harem of some great noble; but the duke's palaces were surrounded by a wall only on three sides, from which ran, parallel to the river-front, several streets, and among them the gold and silver streets, so designated from their being inhabited by artists skilled in the working of those metals. The sun had set when Dhamaphat reached his home, but it was already night. Here there is no twilight,--that soft messenger that lingers, unwilling, as it were, to usher in the darkness of night. Moonlight, with its silvery touches, rested on the palace roofs and made even ugliness and decay beautiful. The tall cocoa and betel palms, moved by the wood-nymphs, fluttered and waved their branches to and fro, beckoning him nearer and nearer, and presenting a spectacle, strange, yet lovely in the extreme.