The Remittance-Woman

Front matter

The Remittance-Woman

BY ACHMED ABDULLAH

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC. 1924

Chapter 1

The Remittance-Woman

CHAPTER I

A DINNER IN CHINA

I SAY, old bean!” Marie Campbell addressed a long, rather limp youth with a pleasantly innocuous face.

“Wha-at, old thing?” he asked languidly.

“Feel energetic?”

“Quite.”

“Good! I’ll shoot you a game of cowboy pool before lunch.”

“Stakes?”

“You bet,” said Marie Campbell. “The drinks and a fifty-spot.”

As Tom Van Zandt rose to follow her into the billiard-room of the country club at the Maine resort, a cough she knew well came from the farther door and caused her to turn.

“Yes, father dear?”—with a slightly martyred air.

“I want a few words with you, Marie.”

She walked up to him.

“What is the trouble?” she asked.

“I was in the next room. I heard what you’ve been saying to that young jackanapes of a Tom Van Zandt.”

“Dad, that sort of talk happens to be the fad just now in our gang2”

“Gang?”

“Set—if you prefer. Why, Muriel Brewster always calls her father ‘darling old turnip.’”

“I don’t care what she calls him! I don’t care what anybody calls—oh—anybody,” he finished weakly.

“What’s all the fuss about, then?”

“Your lolling around here with Tom2”

“Nothing much wrong with him except his brain and the color of his socks, dad2”

“And,” her father interrupted, “asking him to shoot you a game of cowboy pool. The drinks and a fifty-spot! It isn’t becoming a girl. And”—crescendo—“that isn’t all!”

“No?”.

Her voice was as cold as ice. She was fond of her father, and he of her, in a curiously impersonal manner. But both were impatient and headstrong. For a number of years—Mrs. Anthony Campbell had died in giving birth to Marie, and there was a challenging silence whenever the girl mentioned her mother—father and daughter had lived in the uncomfortable relations existing between two intimately connected persons who realize that the atmosphere about them is surcharged with innumerable little explosive atoms.

“Darn it all!” her father exclaimed. “You’ve lost all your feminine sweetness and restraint. You talk like a man, behave like a man, smoke like a man, and”—he wound up accusingly, furiously, yet somehow triumphantly—“you make debts like a man! Here!” And he produced a thick sheaf of varicolored papers.

“Bills?” she inquired, bored.

“I’ve made a little compilation of them for your benefit, young lady.” He took a typewritten sheet from his pocket. “Here!”

“Surely you can afford to pay it, can’t you, dad?”

“Of course. That isn’t the question.”

“What is?”

“The sort of stuff you spend my money on. For instance, I don’t mind this seven hundred dollars for frocks and frills and all that. Nor this—Madame—oh—Hickamadoodle’s bill for a dozen hats. But—look at this—and this—and that!”

She did.

“Polo-mallets, one hundred and seventy-five dollars. English hunting-saddle, ninety-five. Yes?” She looked up questioningly.

“Go on. There!” He pointed at another detailed row of items.

“But,” she rejoined mildly, “you told me only the other day that I could buy myself a new outfit2”

“A woman’s! Not a man’s! Breeches! Cigarettes! Poker-chips!”

“What are you going to do about it, dad?”

“I’m going to give you your choice. Do you want to be a girl, and behave like one, or be treated like a man?”

“You mean that, dad?”

“Absolutely!”

“All right,” she said. “In the future you may treat me as if I were a man.”

“You realize what you are choosing?”

“Quite, dad.”

“You are willing to take the same chance I took when I was a young chap?”

“Yes.”

“Marie,” he said, “I accept your choice. You will start your new career at once. To-morrow we go back to town. I’ll give you a check there. I’ll make it a thousand—2”

“Why a thousand?” she drawled.

“To start you in life.”

“Did you say you’d give me the same chance you had when you went out into the world?”

“Yes. Well?”—as he saw her smile.

“Dad,” she said slowly, “last year I went to Scotland—and saw grandfather. He told me things about you—when you were a young man.”

“What has all that to do with2”

“Wait! He told me how irresponsible you had been for years after leaving college—how at last, in desperation, he asked you to leave Scotland for Scotland’s good. In fact, you came over to America as a remittance-man, didn’t you?”

“I did. But—I did make good.”

His thoughts roamed back down the vista of the gray, dead years—his impetuous youth, two terms at Oxford, expulsion on a number of charges. Scrapes, right and left. His father had sent him to America, and he had become a remittance-man. A thousand dollars every quarter, and it had never lasted more than a month—whisky, cards, dice, horses. And step by step he had drifted down the ladder until one day, suddenly, something like a colored ball of glass had shivered to pieces in his brain, had shown himself to himself in the naked, pitiless light of self-understanding.

That was in the Northwest, not far from the Washington-British Columbia boundary-line. He was completely broke. But that day the little red wilderness gods had piped to him, and he had followed their call, across the boundary-line into British Columbia, north, up along the Michel Creek—to find what he might. He had trekked on foot, finding occasional work in mines and lumber camps. Then one day, clearing the snow from the ground to make a fire, he had found a little crumbly, black powder—coal!

He had been too poor to buy dynamite. And so Jack Henderson, the Crow’s Nest Pass storekeeper, who was nearly as poor as himself, grub-staked him for all he could. He had worked with pick and shovel all that winter into the summer. But he had found his first true vein and to-day Campbell & Henderson—the same Jack Henderson of the Crow’s Nest Pass store—were the biggest coal operators in the Northwest, solidly rich, with offices and town houses in New York and country places in Maine and on Long Island.

Since then his life had been a steady routine of work and success. He had interrupted it only once, a little over twenty-two years ago, when he had gone on a trip round the world, and had spent over a year in China, whence he had returned, white-haired, rather bitter, with a little baby girl in his arms. Yes—he had curtly told Jack Henderson and his other friends—he had married in China. And—yes—his wife had died in childbirth.

To-day the beginnings of his fortune seemed very far away; very far away, almost unreal, seemed the days when he had been a remittance-man.

But he was an honest man.

“Yes,” he said to his daughter; “once I was a remittance-man, and my father sent me a thousand dollars every three months.”

“Very well,” she went on coolly. “You promised me the same chance you had. Only—make it fifteen hundred a quarter instead of a thousand.”

“Fifteen hundred? Why2”

“High cost of living,” she explained.

“All right,” he gave in finally. “Fifteen hundred a quarter.” He looked at her narrowly, to see if she were bluffing. “Of course on the same conditions which my father2”

“Yes,” she interrupted. “I’ll get my remittances just as long as I stay away from America2”

“Any time you want to come back—and behave like a girl2”

“I know. But I’m really tickled to get away. Always been crazy to go to China.”

“China?” He looked up, startled.

“Yes, dad. I was born there, wasn’t I? What other reason could there be—except perhaps inherited Wanderlust?”

“Yes—yes.” An expression of suspicion left his face.

“Well—there you are! I shall start this week.”

“Very well.” He lit a cigar. “By the way—remember that little Chinese vase you had ever since you were a baby?”

“You mean that brittle thing with the two funny, wriggly gold dragons?”

“That’s the one. Take it along. And”—he coughed, evidently searching for words—“don’t show it to people—and don’t talk about it—unless”—he hesitated—“unless you absolutely have to.”

“But—what2”

“I am Scotch.” He gave a forced laugh. “And so you must forgive my Scotch superstitions. But—is it a promise?”

“About the vase?”

“Yes.”

“All right, dad. I promise.”

All this had happened over six months before, and now Marie Campbell was in her hotel at Canton, at the edge of the Shameen, the Foreign Concession, with a view, in the distance, of White Cloud Mountain. She wondered what she should do. Of course she could cable to her father, and the reply would be immediate and generous. But it was not alone her inherited pride which prevented her from doing so. It was also that, somehow, even in these few months, China had got beneath her skin in a strange way. For, in her non-thinking moments, there was always about her a curious impression that she belonged here. Yet—what was there for her to do?

Two weeks before, her quarterly check had come. She had spent every cent of it in the gorgeous silk and jade shops near the Gate of Eternal Purity. And here was Liu Po-Yat, the Manchu chambermaid, with a note from Monsieur Paul Pailloux, the hotel manager, asking Miss Campbell to settle her bill before ten o’clock the next morning, or2

“Or?”

She turned to Liu Po-Yat, who looked down at her from her great height, her handsome face inscrutable beneath the glory of her raven-black hair.

“Miss Campbell,” she said in perfect English, “I see no necessity for the ‘or.’”

“Don’t you?”

Marie Campbell was surprised that Liu Po-Yat, who, ever since she had come to the Great Eastern Hotel to live, had not opened her mouth except to answer in gliding Mongol syllables to the few Chinese words—enough to ask for fresh towels and ice-water—Marie had managed to pick up, was able to speak English—fluent, careful English, not the pidgin of the river coolies.

“No,” Liu Po-Yat replied to her question. “You see—there is Mr. Moses d’Acosta2”

“Look here2”

“Mr. d’Acosta is waiting for you downstairs in the salon,” Liu Po-Yat finished imperturbably.

Mr. Moses d’Acosta had seen the light of day fifty years earlier in Constantinople in a crooked, dim street a stone’s throw from the Yedi Koulé Kapoussi, the Gate of the Seven Towers. He spoke Turkish as fluently as he spoke Arabic and French and English and German and the Levantine lingua franca. But his native tongue was an archaic Spanish, which he used, even in preference to Hebrew, when he chanted his prayers to Jahveh, the God of Abraham and of Jacob. For he was a “Spaniol,” a descendant of one of those noble Spanish-Jewish families who were driven from their native land when the last of the Moorish caliphs went down under the straight swords of Castile and Leon and who migrated, some to Morocco and Tunis, others to Turkey.

To-day he was one of the richest men in the Le vant, with interests that reached from Peking to London. He was a typical Jew in so far as he was both a doer and a dreamer, rarest, most irresistible of combinations.

Marie had met him first a week before in a mazed bazaar near the Temple of the Five Hundred Lohans and, the same night, in the hotel lobby. She had noticed him immediately. Nobody could help noticing him. Then, only two days ago, she had met him again, as she came from a Chinese shop where, with utter recklessness, she had spent a hundred dollars, the tail-end of her quarterly remittance, for an exquisite vase of Ning-yan porcelain. The shop being in the slums of Canton, a rabble of Gilyak Tartars, former soldiers, discharged since the Chinese revolution and holding the “foreign devils” responsible for the downfall of the Manchu dynasty, had followed her and were pelting her with mud when Moses d’Acosta swung round the corner, dispersed the mob at the point of his revolver, and had seen her home to the hotel, where he, too, lived.

On the way there he had talked to her—at first about impersonal matters, then, suddenly, he had made a remark which had surprised her.

“Good ship—the Empress of Malaysia.”

“Oh, you know that2”

“That you took the C. P. R. liner to Hongkong—and then came up here on the British Navigation ship? Of course.”

“How do you know?”

“Curiosity is my middle name, I suppose.” And, suddenly, disconcertingly, “Why did you decide all at once to come to China?”

“Oh—I2” She had found herself uneasy and nonplussed, and when, back at the hotel, he had asked her to dine with him that very night, she had been conscious of her desire to accept, although her lips, almost mechanically, had formed the glib white lie: “Thank you, but I’d rather not—headache, you know.”

“Very well, Miss Campbell,” he had replied. “Some other time.” And he had repeated questioningly, “Some other time,” and had added, almost in a whisper, “Our tastes are the same, you know.”

“In what?”

“In Chinese porcelain, don’t you think?”

He had not even waited for her answer, but had walked away and, looking after him, she had seen him step up to and exchange greetings with an elderly, enormously stout Manchu dressed in brocaded silk.

“Sun Yu-Wen, the famous Pekingese banker,” the desk clerk had told her in answer to her question.

“Mr. d’Acosta is waiting for you down-stairs,” repeated Liu Po-Yat. “He has expressed to me his hope that you will approve of the dinner which he took the liberty of ordering.”

“Dinner—you said he ordered?” Marie was thoroughly roused.

“Gray molossol caviar as first course,” went on the Manchu woman. “He had noticed in the dining room that you are fond of it.”

“I never had any caviar since I came here.”

“No? Perhaps, then, on board ship.”

“He wasn’t there.”

“Somebody may have told him,” said the Manchu woman. “Anyway, it will be served to-night. He gets his own caviar direct from Astrakhan—through the courtesy of Prince Pavel Kokoshkine.”

Suddenly, unreasoningly, the situation struck Marie as startlingly amusing.

“Liu,” she asked, “far be it from me to butt into your private affairs. But—what do you know about molossol caviar? How do you know? And who taught you to express your views in such ripping English, old dear?”

The Manchu woman looked at her for a long time, silently, doubtingly. Then she seemed to make up her mind.

“My father,” she said—and she said it as a New Yorker might mention that his people were Knickerbockers, not boastingly, but as a simple statement of fact—“was the hereditary captain-general of the Seventh Manchu Banner Corps. He was a cousin-in-blood to the Son of Heaven, a nurhachi—an iron-capped prince. For years he was Chinese minister for the old Buddha, the dowager empress, in different European capitals. I was educated abroad. I am”—again she spoke unboastingly—“an aristocrat.”

“Oh, you are? And to-day you are—” She indicated the other’s neat uniform.

“To-day,” came the rejoinder, “I am still an aristocrat, still a cousin to the Son of Heaven.”

“But the Son of Heaven has been deposed and imprisoned.”

“Indeed?”

Marie laughed. “Not a very sound believer in the Chinese republic, in lusty young Democracy, are you?” she asked.

“Are you?”

“What have I to do with China? I am an American.”

“Oh—yes”—the other gave a gliding smile—“I almost forgot.”

Marie smiled back. She liked the other better and better.

“Of course,” she said, “being a woman and an American, I am curious. Tell me—why didn’t you ask me to mind my own business?”

“Because I trust you.”

“Why do you trust me, a stranger?”

“Perhaps I do not consider you altogether a stranger.”

“Flattering, old dear!”

“And perhaps,” continued the other, “it is just a woman’s whim.”

“‘Sisters under the skin,’ eh? All right. Let’s stick together. But2 Which reminds me—why Moses d’Acosta?”

“He has money,” coolly replied Liu Po-Yat.

But the other was not deceived.

“Now you’re giving me an Oriental half-truth. Of course he has the tin. But there are also other reasons why you want me to dine with him.”

“Perhaps,” smiled Liu Po-Yat.

“Very well. The main question is: Would you dine with him if you were me?”

“If I had to.” Liu Po-Yat pointed to the manager’s dunning note. “Remember that you are a woman—and clever—and beautiful,” the Manchu added. She turned to the telephone. “Shall I tell the desk clerk?”

“No; go down yourself and speak to Mr. d’Acosta. Bring him up with you in half an hour. Wait”—as the manchu was about to open the door. “Tell him that I prefer my champagne rather sweet—Russian style.”

“Do you?” asked Liu Po-Yat. “So does the Prince Pavel Kokoshkine. You will get on very well with him.”

“Is the prince going to be at dinner to-night?”

“No. The prince would like to dine with you to-morrow night. If it is agreeable to you, Prince Kokoshkine will call for you to-morrow night at seven.”

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

THE VASE OF TCHOU-FOU-YAO

LIU PO-YAT had shuffled out of the room before Marie could find words to do justice to her stupefaction. Two dinner invitations, from two strangers! And she was enough of a woman of the world to realize that both invitations were the result of her financial embarrassment, that somehow Moses d’Acosta as well as Prince Kokoshkine must have found out about it.

“Can’t be helped,” she thought, as she chose a necklace of mutton-fat jade, looked at her other jewels, considering if she should pawn them.

“Not yet,” she decided.

She rummaged in her jewel-box; then, when her fingers encountered the little Chinese vase which her father, explaining his wish by a reference to his Scotch superstitions, had asked her to take along, she hesitated. She liked it. It was no bigger than a thumb-nail, but absolutely perfect in shape and color, green, with two gold dragons as handles, and painted on the inside with figures so small that one would need a magnifying glass to make them out. She picked it up now; then, obeying a curious instinct, slipped it in the fold of her girdle.

Prince Pavel Kokoshkine was a Russian aristocrat of the old régime, who had fought through the war as a captain of Cossacks. Like many of his class, he had found himself unprepared for the brutal sweep of the revolution. He did not know what to do. The basis of his life was smashed. So he left Russia and, embittered, like many others of his race and caste, turned his eyes eastward, to Mongolia, China—the yellow lands whence, centuries earlier, certain of his Tartar ancestors had come. China, caught in the backwash of its own revolutionary troubles, with the Manchus intriguing in the north, the Japanese in Shantung, and ultraradical elements in the south, was more than ready to avail itself of his military knowledge, though in his own country he had been identified with reactionary politics.

To-day he was a major-general in the Chinese Republican army, stationed in Canton, with headquarters not for from the Nan-Hai prison and in command over the Southern Shenchi Ying, or “Augustly Divine Mechanism Army,” as the Chinese call their foreign-drilled field forces. He seldom set foot in the Shameen, the European quarter, avoided all intercourse with Europeans and Americans as much as he could, and lived in the manner of a mandarin—and he had asked Marie to dine with him to-morrow night!

She was perturbed as she thought of it, and felt rather relieved when the door opened and Liu Po-Yat announced Mr. Moses d’Acosta.

“Good-evening,” he said.

“Good-evening, Mr. d’Acosta.”

He was completely sure of himself, neither brazen nor in the way he bent over her hand nor embarrassingly apologetic for his unconventional invitation. Suddenly he walked over to the center-table, picked up the hotel bill and tore it negligently across and across.

“That’s all right,” he said, in answer to Marie’s expostulation. “It was just a silly mistake on the part of Monsieur Pailloux.”

“But2”

“What have I to do with it? Why, I own the hotel.” He bowed. “You will be my guest, Miss Campbell.”

“But—”

“My dear young lady, there are no obligations. I’ve been often the guest of2” He coughed, was silent.

“Whose guest?”

“Well, shall we call him your uncle? Or shall we call him Mr. Mavropoulos? Or shall we go straight back into ancient history and call him—ah—what is the old Tartar title he loved so?—the Ssu Yueh, eh, Miss Campbell?”

“But—what-2”

Almost instinctively she choked the questions that crowded to her lips as she happened to catch the Manchu woman’s eyes, with a sharp message of warning in their depths.

“Quite so,” she went on lamely. “Shall we go down-stairs?”

“Just a moment, please!”

He crossed the room in a leisurely manner. In the farther corner stood an inlaid and lacquered rosewood table that supported the many Chinese curios on which she had squandered her quarter’s remittance during her strolls through the bazaars—bronze and jade, but mostly porcelain. He picked up and examined a few of the pieces.

“Charming!” he said, as he held up a tiny vase of crackled ruby and green. He looked at her narrowly. “Pardon me2”

“Yes, Mr. d’Acosta?”

“Have you, by any chance, a specimen of Tchou-fou-yao porcelain?”

There was something in the innocent-enough question which filled her with uneasiness, caused her to look, as if for support, at the Manchu woman who stood there silent and rigid. She could have sworn that d’Acosta had intercepted the look; that a slight tremor of rage, quickly suppressed, was running through him. The Manchu woman coughed. Something dramatic was in the atmosphere, something almost sinister—and Marie gave a little shudder.

“Why,” she replied, and she had to control herself to keep from stammering, “I am not an expert when it comes to Chinese art. I just like these things—hardly know their names2”

“Of course you don’t!” said Mr. d’Acosta, with a gliding wink in his eyes that gave the lie to her words. “Shall we go down to dinner before the Chinese cook gives way to his racial leanings and puts rats’ tails into our caviar?”

He said this with a laugh. But again Marie Campbell was conscious of a tragic undercurrent.

She left the room and walked quickly down-stairs to the crimson-and-gold dining room, the man by her side, both talking vaguely about the weather.

The last she saw, as she half turned on the threshold of her room, was the Manchu woman staring after her, an inscrutable message in her eyes.

The scene in the dining room was typical of the snobbish, self-centered foreign colony in the Shameen. The place might have been a Broadway cabaret, a restaurant in the Chicago Loop, a London supper club, or a shimmering, glistening dance-place of the Parisian boulevards. Marie saw, felt.

“Don’t you mind them. I know how you feel about China,” said d’Acosta.

“Do you?”

“Of course. And these people do not matter. China is like a huge lump of rubber. You can make an impression on it by pressing hard. But take your fingers away—and the rubber will jump straight back into place. There will not even be a mark left. And these people here—with their jewels and their low-cut dresses and their millions—they’ll die some day—and China will live.”

“Why, I’ve been told that you are a multimillionaire yourself—and your interests in China2”

“Quite right. I am rich. But I am an idealist, a constructive idealist. I am a good friend of China. I wish I could make you see it. Then perhaps you would help me, instead of trying to2”

“What?”

“Play ’possum—that’s what you call it in America, eh? Never mind. We’ll talk about it some other time.”

“Mr. d’Acosta,” she began, “I assure you2”

“Never mind, Miss Campbell,” he repeated.

A little later he referred again to her apocryphal uncle.

“Mr. Mavropoulos used to like this place. It amused him.”

“Mr. Mavropoulos?”

“Call him the Ssu Yueh; call him by his Tartar title, if you prefer. I don’t think the republic will mind.”

He accompanied his remarks with a low laugh, as if to warn her that she wouldn’t tell the truth, and that he knew she wouldn’t.

“I hope you are enjoying this little party,” he said. “I owe it to your uncle’s memory to be nice to you.”

“I don’t call that a compliment,” she replied, and, the next moment, his words echoing in her mind, she caught at something in their meaning—when he had mentioned her apocryphal uncle’s “memory.” The little mischievous imp in her heart caused her now to probe more deeply into the mystery she felt gathering about her, to throw out a slightly grieved:

“Did you say my uncle’s memory? Is he—” She paused, wondering how far she dare go.

“Yes,” d’Acosta replied; “he is dead. They got him. He always knew they would. And you hadn’t really heard that he died?”

“No,” she replied, truthfully enough, tremendously thrilled, curious what would come next.

“And yet you left America—came here2”

“On an impulse.” Again she spoke the truth.

“Strange coincidence!” He stared at her, his fingers nervously curled round the stem of his champagne-glass. “Then, I take it, you haven’t seen the papers recently. The North China Gazette had quite an article—sensational—but only so to the initiated. Here you are!” He drew from his pocket a newspaper clipping. “Outsiders wouldn’t be able to make head or tail of it. It’s put in the form of a literary curiosity, a translation of some ancient bit of Chinese mysticism—I suppose you have the cipher2”

“I’ll read it afterward,” she replied, cramming the clipping into her purse.

“Very well.” And, to her disappointment, he led the conversation back to impersonalities, to interrupt himself, with the same disconcerting suddenness and to ask her again the curiously innocent, curiously disturbing question he had put to her in her room.

“Tell me, Miss Campbell; have you not really a specimen of Tchou-fou-yao porcelain?”

“But”—she was becoming embarrassed at the tremendous earnestness that throbbed in his accents—“Mr. d’Acosta2”

“Tchou-fou-yao,” he insisted. “The porcelain of emperors! A tiny vase no bigger than a thumb-nail, with two gold dragons snarling over its lizard-green surface, an orifice belled like the cup of a flower, and painted on the inside with infinitesimal figures.”

Marie’s hand stole to her girdle. She felt the little vase there, said to herself that it seemed to tally with the one of which d’Acosta was speaking. She felt sorry for the man. Should she tell him? Should she show him the vase? Then she remembered her father’s strange warning the day they had parted: “Don’t show it to people, and don’t talk about it unless you absolutely have to.” She gave a little shudder of apprehension.

What was this mystery into which she felt herself drawn as if into a whirlpool? This stranger knew about it, the Manchu maid, and also her father. What was there back of it all? Why had her father never spoken to her about it? Then she recalled her own feelings during the last few months; how, subconsciously, it had seemed to her that China mattered more to her than she knew and that—yes; the realization came like a shock—that she mattered to China.

“Why,” she said, “you talk like a typical collector—the frantic sort, you know, who holds his friends’ Wedgwood teacups upside down and then pronounces them to be forgeries!”

“Don’t play with me,” he said. “Can’t I make you see? Can’t I make you understand?” He was tremendously in earnest, and for a moment Marie felt like confessing that she had been playing with him. But, somehow, she again recalled her father’s warning. “But—Miss Campbell—please—won’t you2” He slurred, stopped.

Again the little mischievous imp rose in her heart and whispered to her to fathom this mystery.

“Mr. d’Acosta,” she said ingenuously, “why don’t you tell me the truth?”

“Eh?” He looked up sharply.

“I mean, rather, why don’t you put all your cards on the table?”

“All my cards? But—you know them all!”

“Do I?” she countered.

“You know you do! Don’t you—won’t you understand? It is not a question with me of dollars and cents. No, no!”

She felt nonplussed. Then she decided to aim another shot into the blue, recalling certain conversations between her father and his partner, Jack Henderson, when they were searching for the usual explanation through which too rich people like to excuse their greed to themselves.

“Power,” she said serenely. “It’s power you’re after, Mr. d’Acosta!”

“No. Power—why—that’s an old tale to me. I am bored with power. What I want is something big, basic! And if you have any of your uncle’s blood, you would2”

“Here’s my mysterious uncle again!” thought Marie, and the next moment Mr. d’Acosta’s features were blotted into a reddish-purple smudge as a great shadow fell across the table.

Marie, looking up, beheld the Pekingese banker, Sun Yu-Wen, whom, a few days earlier, she had watched in such animated conversation, with her host. His immense body was dressed in a rather extravagantly Pekingese style—a long robe of orange-colored, satin-lined grenadine silk embroidered with black bats, and on his round cap a button of transparent red, the emblem of a mandarin of the first class, worn in calm defiance of the fact that the republic had forbidden the wearing of imperial insignia.

“Ah—good-evening!” His words were soft; his fat, ivory-yellow, passionless face was suffused with a patient kindliness. Yet, for all this kindliness, he gave Marie the impression of something impersonal, very ancient, very tired, even, in a passive way, unhuman.

Mr. d’Acosta had risen and bowed. The other had returned the salutation, Chinese fashion, with his hands clasped over his huge chest. Both looked at each other tensely, observantly. To Marie, it was like a scene out of a play—a moment of tremendous suspense, of waiting—for what? “Enemies”—the melodramatic thought came to her—“bitter enemies!” Yet the smiles on keen Semitic and bland Mongol faces were not sneers. It was a smile from the heart, of genuine mutual liking.