He had fallen into a universe which seemed to be more and more inextricably jumbled as his outlook widened. But how splendidly interesting! Take just the little fraction of it given up to the Czecho-Slovacs and the Jugo-Slavs . . . Serbs, Croats, Slovenes. . . . He had hitherto paid as little attention to them as to Lepidoptera and Coleoptera, and other families of bugs with Latin names, to whose history and habits, not being an entomologist, he was perfectly indifferent. He had never thought of them as possible factors in the future of Europe. Now that he was in touch with his kind again, London ceased to be a city of dreadful night. In his enthusiastic eyes it had almost become a _ville lumière_. A week had wrought miraculous changes—that day the most miraculous of all. At the back of his delight, through the evening’s rare entertainment ran a thrill of amazed happiness. A week ago he had floundered here derelict, lost, unwanted, a sick Chinaman his only link with humanity. Now he was safe on sunny seas, bound once more to life by friends, by a new-found son, in itself an adamantine tie, and, wonder of wonders, by the woman for whose sake he had revolutionized his existence and whose fragrant girlish memory had sanctified his after years. He might have married well in China. Polygamy being recognized, the fact of his having a wife alive in England would not have rendered such a marriage illegal according to Chinese law. He had many opportunities, for he held a position there unique for a European; and a delicately nurtured Chinese lady can be an exquisite thing in womanhood, more than alluring to a lonely, full-blooded man. But ever between him and a not dishonourable temptation had floated the flower-shape of the English girl with her pink and white face and her light brown hair and her hazel eyes, through which shone her English wit and her English understanding and her English love and her English soul. Not that he had eaten out his heart for twenty years for Marcelle. He had wiped her as a disturbing element clean out of his existence. His loyalty had been passive rather than active. He had made no attempt to throw open gates and go in search of her. But at hostile approach the gates had been uncompromisingly shut. The wonder of wonders had happened. In one respect, the wonder of all possible wonders had happened. There had been no disillusion.