'The years passed. Never another hint of my father's fate reached me, but I resolved that when I grew up I would find out the truth about him, and that until his name was cleared, I would mention my father to nobody. Then, how to get to the East? Most of my small patrimony had been swallowed up in my education. Also, even if I could get to India it would be difficult to prosecute the search there without giving out that I was the son of a man disgraced. At last, however, I got into touch with an old scholar who was going to China to collect materials for a book on eastern history. This seemed my chance. I had read over and over again my father's letter to Major Fetherston, with the help of maps, and it seemed to me, since this valley of ghosts was supposed to be far _east_ of the mountains, that my father must have penetrated into Tibet, and that country could be approached quite as well from the China side as from India. So I closed with the old historian. I was to serve him as secretary for a year, by the end of which time I had no doubt I should have found something to support me until the opportunity came to go inland and follow my quest at closer quarters. We sailed together to Shanghai, but there, on the day after landing, he died very suddenly, leaving me on the rocks. How I hawked my learning in vain round the Treaty Ports you already know. The night I met Saunders Philipson I was at the end of my tether and desperate; I had expended my last dollars on a bend with two officers off a river steamer, fully intending to go to the British Consul next morning and present myself as a beachcomber in want of a passage home. Philipson's commission in Shanghai I naturally jumped at, and then, when I heard that he was going up country to investigate a legend apparently identical with what I had been brooding over for years, believe me, Mirlees, I very nearly collapsed. I fancy that one fact has done more to establish my faith in a Providence than all the chapels I ever attended at school and the 'Varsity.' He stopped, with an air so grave you would never have believed this was the same casual young exquisite we had picked up at Nanking. If the adventure had done nothing more for Stephen Poyning, it had deepened his draught considerably.