If Mercy were disposed to make much of Sylvia, the latter was only too ready to return her kindness with that devotion which a younger girl often feels for one considerably older than herself. With Sylvia it was not a shifting fancy, such as Nina Forster formed nearly every week, and changed as rapidly, but a genuine love, founded on a firm basis of all-round admiration. She thought Mercy the prettiest, cleverest, and best girl she had ever known in her life, and when she discovered her to be the heroine of a most romantic history, her interest in her was increased a thousandfold. She had heard once or twice that Mercy was an orphan, and had no home of her own to go to during the holidays, but it was only by degrees she gathered the various facts of the case, though when they were fitted together they formed a narrative as thrilling as any to be found in the gaily bound volumes over which it had been her delight to pore. As Sylvia got the account mostly in disjointed scraps, first from one girl and then from another, and was obliged to connect them for herself, it will be as well to tell Mercy's story here as she learnt it more fully afterwards, since it had some bearing and influence on various incidents which happened later and led in the end to unforeseen events. Fifteen years ago there was great uneasiness among the white residents of the city of Tsien-Lou, in a certain inland province of China. There had been rumours of serious riots and outrages against foreigners farther up the country; terrible tales were whispered of houses burnt and families murdered, and both the British Consul and the Commissioner of Trade had warned the little colony of Europeans to keep strictly within its own quarter, and not to trust to any fair promises made by their yellow-skinned, almond-eyed neighbours, who resented their presence in the land with such fierce intolerance. Business for a while was suspended; it was not considered safe for a white face to be seen in the streets, and even the Chinese servants who did their daily duties in the houses were regarded with suspicion. Only the Ingledew Medical Missionary Station, at the outskirts of the town near the old Kia-yu gate, went on with its work as usual, nursing the sick in the hospital, attending to the numerous outpatients who came every day for medicine and treatment, teaching the children in the school, and holding the daily Bible readings which all were still invited to attend. It was an anxious time for both doctors and nurses; they knew that they carried their lives in their hands, and that at some given signal the flame of fanaticism might burst out, and hordes of shrieking, murderous, pigtailed natives might sweep over the mission, leaving nothing but smoking ruins and desolation behind them.