ts feverish past. It had built itself on the hopes of a
moment, and what spread from it still was the spell of the new, the
changing, and the reckless. It drew still from the ends of the earth.
The broad road in over the mountains, the broad road out over the ocean
made it where it stood, touching all trades, a road-house of the world.

Some dim perception of this touched Flora as the houses, gliding past,
grew older, grayer, with steeper gardens, narrower streets, here and
there even trees, lone, sentinel, at the edge of cobbled gutters. From
the crest of the last hill they had looked a mile down the long gray
throat of the street to where the ferry building lay stretched out with
its one tall tower pricked up among the masts of shipping. Half-way
between their momentary perch and the ferry slips the street suddenly
thickened, darkened, swarmed, flying a yellow pennon high above
blackened roofs. And now, as they slipped down the long decline into
the foreign quarter the pungent oriental breath of Chinatown was blown
up to them. She breathed it in readily. It was pleasant because it was
strange, outlandish, suggesting a wide web of life beyond her own
knowledge. She wondered what Harry was thinking of it, as he sat with
his passive profile turned from her to the heathen street ahead. She
guessed, by the curl of his nostril, that it was only present to him as
an unpleasant odor to be got through as quickly as possible; but she was
wrong. He had another thought. This time, oddly enough, a thought for
her.

He gave it to her presently, abrupt, matter-of-fact, material. "That
Chinese goldsmith down there has good stuff now and then. How'd you like
to look in there before we go on to what-you-call-'em's,--the regular
place?"

"You mean for a ring?" She was doubtful only of his being in earnest.

"You have so many of the Shrove kind," he explained. "I thought you
might like it, Flora; you're so romantic!" he laughed.

"Like it!" she cried, too touched at his thought for her to resent the
imputation. "I should love it! But I didn't know they had such things."

"Now and then--though it is a rare chance."

"But that will be just the fun of it," she hastened, half afraid lest
Harry should change his mind, "to see if we can possibly find one that
will be different from all these others."

She kept this little feeling of exploration close about her, as they
left the car, a block above the green trees of the plaza, and enter