was not the same face. It was,
instead, the face of a desperate, possibly dangerous man, who had
brooded over this monomania in the gorges of the great Chinese river,
in the filthy yamens of barbarous mountain towns, in the forts of
hill-robbers who practiced extraordinary cruelties. He had fought his
way through rapids whose very names were ominous--"The King of Hell's
Slide," the "Last Look at Home," the "Place Where the Soul Itself Is
Lost." He had sat with the free people of Nosuland, the enemies of the
Chinese, eating from bowls of camphorwood raw sheep's heart minced with
pepper, sometimes expecting permission to go free, sometimes sure of
being tortured with the split bamboo. At last they had sent him back
with gifts. Then, rushing home to her, he had been led by her greeting
to believe that his miseries were ended.

What a mockery of hope! On those journeys of his, roused from his
acquiescence in ill-health and failure, moved by a savage
determination, he had accomplished the impossible, in body and
character had exceeded his limitations. He had taken as his pattern
the rival whom she had preferred. He had built up in himself the
counterfeits of those qualities by which Lawrence Teck had won her.
Yet now he must see her devoting herself to a man who was the
antithesis of all that she had previously preferred.

It was unendurable! But how was he to escape it? By hating her? Yes,
surely she was worthy of his hatred, heartless, cruel, the cause of all
these innumerable torments from which he sometimes got a moment of
madness.

"What do I see in you?" he said between his teeth.

She had on a copper-colored gown hung over her slender shoulders by two
straps. Maybe because its hue was a deeper shade of the same color as
her hair, her eyes, and even her pale-brown skin, the costume seemed
part of her. He could see nothing about her that was not exquisite--no
detail from which to build up a remedial distaste. So he ground out at
her:

"Your nature? What rot!--as if that ever attracted me, with its false
pretenses of heart, its instabilities and downright treacheries. What
else do you offer? This that I see? What we human fools call beauty?
What is beauty?"

She sat down in despair, observing that even his jaws, under his heavy
mustache, looked more salient. It was almost laughable, she thought;
but she was far from laughing. Every moment she expected to hear the
doorbell.

He continued fero