He detected something of resentment in her tone. “What do those characters mean?” she asked. “Is it something I shouldn’t know?” she asked quickly. She looked up at his face. There was a dull flush on his face and a strange light in his eyes. He fingered the jade bracelet absently. “There is nothing you should not know,” he said briefly--for him. “There is much that I have wanted to know for years.” She was puzzled, and showed it. “Listen,” he said, and read, turning the bracelet slowly as he read: “I am Shun the son of the great mechanic Chu-Shun upon whom the door fell when the Emperor passed. This my father told me before the day, fearing the treachery of the eunuchs. Behold the pelican on the left wall with the bronze neck… afterwards the spirit steps of jade… afterwards river of silver, afterwards… door of bronze. Here Emperor… behind a great room filled with most precious treasures.” He read it twice, then handed the bracelet to the girl. She looked at him for the space of a minute. Here, in the heart of prosaic London, with the dull roar of the traffic coming to them gustily across the sparse herbage of a most commonplace park, Shun the son of Chu-Shun spoke across the gulf of twenty centuries. “It is very wonderful,” she said, and looked at the bracelet. “I think you had better let me keep this bracelet,” he said; “at any rate for a while. I beg you to believe”--he raised his hand solemnly--“that I consider only your own safety, and I am moved to the suggestion by the knowledge that you attach no sentimental value to the ornament, that it was given to you by somebody whom your mother likes, but who is repugnant to you, and that you only wear it in order to save yourself the discomfort and exasperation of a daily argument with your parent.” She stared at him in open-eyed amazement. “How--how did you know that?” she asked. “You carry it in your bag. You frowned when you took it out to show me,” he said cheerfully. “You carry it in your bag only because you must keep it by you in order to slip it on and off when you are out of somebody’s sight. If it were your fiancé, you would either wear it or leave it at home--engaged people clear up their differences as they go along. Evidently you are a lady of strong character, strong enough to respect the foibles or the demands of your elders. Therefore it must be your father or your mother; and since fathers are naturally indignant and notoriously unsentimental, I cannot imagine that he would insist----” “Thank you,” she said hurriedly. “Will you keep the bracelet for me, and return it at your leisure to this address?” She extracted a card from her bag, and he looked at it and read: Miss Yvonne Yale. 406, Upper Curzon Street, S.W. “Yvonne,” he read gravely. “I’ve never known anybody named Yvonne.” He put the bracelet in his inside pocket, and buttoned the worn coat again.