w toward a future gleam. The feeling
was but momentary. As for Heywood, he still marched on grimly, threading
the stuffed corridors like a man with a purpose.

"No dinner!" he snapped. "Catchee bymby, though. We must see Wutzler
first. To lose sight of any man for twenty-four hours, nowadays,--Well,
it's not hardly fair. Is it?"

They turned down a black lane, carpeted with dry rubbish. At long
intervals, a lantern guttering above a door showed them a hand's-breadth
of the dirty path, a litter of broken withes and basket-weavers' refuse,
between the mouldy wall of the town and a row of huts, no less black and
silent. In this greasy rift the air lay thick, as though smeared into
a groove.

Suddenly, among the hovels, they groped along a checkered surface of
brick-work. The flare of Heywood's match revealed a heavy wooden door,
which he hammered with his fist. After a time, a disgruntled voice
within snarled something in the vernacular. Heywood laughed.

"Ai-yah! Who's afraid? Wutzler, you old pirate, open up!"

A bar clattered down, the door swung back, and there, raising a
glow-worm lantern of oiled paper, stood such a timorous little figure as
might have ventured out from a masquerade of gnomes. The wrinkled face
was Wutzler's, but his weazened body was lost in the glossy black folds
of a native jacket, and below the patched trousers, his bare ankles and
coolie-sandals of straw moved uneasily, as though trying to hide behind
each other.

"Kom in," said this hybrid, with a nervous cackle. "I thought you are
thiefs. Kom in."

Following through a toy courtyard, among shadow hints of pigmy shrubs
and rockery, they found themselves cramped in a bare, clean cell,
lighted by a European lamp, but smelling of soy and Asiatics. Stiff
black-wood chairs lined the walls. A distorted landscape on rice-paper,
narrow scarlet panels inscribed with black cursive characters, pith
flowers from Amoy, made blots of brightness.

"It iss not moch, gentlemen," sighed Wutzler, cringing. "But I am ver'
glad."

Heywood flung himself into a chair.

"Not dead yet, you rascal?" he cried. "And we came all the way to see
you. No chow, either."

"Oh, allow me," mumbled their host, in a flutter. "My--she--I will
speak, I go bring you." He shuffled away, into some further chamber.

Heywood leaned forward quickly.

"Eat it," he whispered, "whether you can or not! Pleases the old one, no
bounds. We're his only visitors--"

"Here iss not