ain to the girl. If he
adhered to this policy--to keep away from her inconspicuously--she
would forget the name by night, and to-morrow even the bearer of it
would sink below the level of recollection. That was life. They
were only passers-by.

Drink for him had a queer phase. It did not cheer or fortify him
with false courage and recklessness; it simply enveloped him in a
mist of unreality. A shudder rippled across his shoulders. He hated
the taste of it. The first peg was torture. But for all that, it
offered relief; his brain, stupefied by the fumes, grew dull, and
conscience lost its edge to bite.

He wiped the sweat from his chin and forehead. His hand shook so
violently that he dropped the handkerchief; and he let it lie on
the floor because he dared not stoop.

Ah Cum, sensing the difficulty, approached, recovered the damp
handkerchief and returned it.

"Thanks."

"Very interesting," said the Chinaman, with a wave of his tapering
hand toward the roofs. "It reminds you of a red sea suddenly
petrified."

"Or the flat stones in the meadows, teeming with life underneath.
Ants."

"You are from America?"

"Yes." But Spurlock put up his guard.

"I am a Yale man," said Ah Cum.

"Yale? Why, so am I." There was no danger in admitting this fact.
Spurlock offered his hand, which Ah Cum accepted gravely. A broken
laugh followed the action. "Yale!" Spurlock's gaze shifted to the
dead hills beyond the window; when it returned to the Chinaman
there was astonishment instead of interest: as if Ah Cum had been a
phantom a moment since and was now actually a human being. "Yale!"
A Chinaman who had gone to Yale!

"Yes. Civil engineering. Mentally but not physically competent. Had
to give up the work and take to this. I'm not noble; so my
honourable ancestors will not turn over in their graves."

"Graves." Spurlock pointed in the sloping fields outside the walls.
"I've counted ten coffins so far."

"Ah, yes. The land about these walls is a common graveyard. Every
day in the year you will witness such scenes. There are no funerals
among the poor, only burials. And many of these deaths could be
avoided if it were not for superstition. Superstition is the
Chinese Reaper. Rituals instead of medicines. Sometimes I try to
talk. I might as well try to build a ladder to heaven. We must take
the children--of any race--if we would teach knowledge. Age is set,
impervious to innovations."

The Chinaman paused. He saw that hi