imed by relatives, was brought up in the institution maintained for
such cases by the Missionary Board of the church to which his father and
mother had given their services. He had lived there till, when he was
seven years old, Tom and Sarah Davenant, childless and yet longing for
a child, had adopted him.

These short and simple annals furnished all that Davenant knew of his
own origin; but after the visit to Hankow the personality of his parents
at least became more vivid. He met old people who could vaguely recall
them. He saw entries in the hospital records made by his father's hand.
He stood by his mother's grave. As for his father's grave, if he had
one, it was like that of Moses, on some lonely Nebo in Hupeh known to
God alone. In the compound Davenant saw the spot on which his father's
simple house had stood--the house in which he himself was born--though a
wing of the modern hospital now covered it. It was a relief to him to
find that, except for the proximity of the lepers' ward and the opium
refuge, the place, with its trim lawns, its roses, its clematis, its
azaleas, its wistaria, had the sweetness of an English rectory garden.
He liked to think that Corinna Meecham had been able to escape from her
duties in the crowded, fetid, multi-colored city right outside the gates
to something like peace and decency within these quiet walls.

He was not a born traveler; still less was he an explorer. At the end of
three days he was glad to take leave of his hosts at the hospital, and
turn his launch down the river toward the civilization of Shanghai. But
it was on the very afternoon of his departure that the ideas came to him
which ultimately took him back to Boston, and of which he was now
thinking as he strolled through the silvery mist beside the Charles.

He had been standing then on the deck of his steam-launch gazing beyond
the river, with its crowding, outlandish junks, beyond the towns and
villages huddled along the banks, beyond walls gay with wistaria, beyond
green rice-fields stretching into the horizon, to where a flaming sunset
covered half the sky--a sunset which itself seemed hostile, mysterious,
alien, Mongolian. He was thinking that it was on just this scene that
his father and mother had looked year upon year before his birth. He
wondered how it was that it had had no prenatal influence on himself. He
wondered how it was that all their devotion had ended with themselves,
that their altruism had died