rected to the memory of
Major Judson Carstair by the monastery at the Head."

The man added a word of explanation.

"The Brotherhood thought that you would wish to know that your father's
body had been recovered, and that it had received Christian burial, as
nearly as we were able to interpret the forms. The stone is a sort of
granite."

The girl wished to ask a thousand questions: How did her father meet his
death, and where? What did they know? What had they recovered with his
body?

The girl spoke impulsively, her words crowding one another. And the
Oriental seemed able only to disengage the last query from the others.

"Unfortunately," he said, "some band of the desert people had passed
before our expedition arrived, nothing was recovered but the body. It
was not mutilated."

They had been standing. The girl now indicated the big library chair in
which she had been huddled and got another for herself. Then she wished
to know what they had learned about her father's death.

The Oriental sat down. He sat awkwardly, his big body, in a kind of
squat posture, the broad Mongolian face emerging, as in a sort of
deformity, from the collar of his evening coat. Then he began to speak,
with that conscious effect of bringing his words through various mediums
from a distance.

"We endeavored to discourage Major Carstair from undertaking this
adventure. We were greatly concerned about his safety. The sunken
plateau of the Gobi Desert, north of the Shan States, is exceedingly
dangerous for an European, not so much on account of murderous attacks
from the desert people, for this peril we could prevent; but there is a
chill in this sunken plain after sunset that the native people only can
resist. No white man has ever crossed the low land of the Gobi."

He paused.

"And there is in fact no reason why any one should wish to cross it. It
is absolutely barren. We pointed out all this very carefully to Major
Carstair when we learned what he had in plan, for as I have said his
welfare was very pressingly on our conscience. We were profoundly
puzzled about what he was seeking in the Gobi. He was not, evidently,
intending to plot the region or to survey any route, or to acquire any
scientific data. His equipment lacked all the implements for such work.
It was a long time before we understood the impulse that was moving
Major Carstair to enter this waste region of the Gobi to the north."

The man stopped, and sat for some mome