for a drink
from the old cold pure spring at home! Tea, coffee, and bottled soda;
nothing that ever touched the thirsty spots in her throat.

She looked up at the stars and they looked down upon her, but what she
asked they could not, would not, answer. Night after night she had
asked, and night after night they had only twinkled as of old. She had
traveled now for four months, and still the doubt beset her. It was to
be a leap in the dark, with no one to tell her what was on the other
side. But why this insistent doubt? Why could she not take the leap
gladly, as a woman should who had given the affirmative to a man? With
him she was certain that she loved him, away from him she did not know
what sentiment really abided in her heart. She was wise enough to
realize that something was wrong; and there were but three months
between her and the inevitable decision. Never before had she known
other than momentary indecision; and it irked her to find that her
clarity of vision was fallible and human like the rest of her. The
truth was, she didn't know her mind. She shrugged, and the movement
stirred the dust that had gathered upon her shoulders.

What a dust-ridden, poverty-ridden, plague-ridden world she had seen!
Ignorance wedded to superstition, yet waited upon by mystery and
romance and incomparable beauty. As the Occidental thought rarely
finds analysis in the Oriental mind, so her mind could not gather and
understand this amalgamation of art and ignorance. She forgot that
another race of men had built those palaces and temples and forts and
tombs, and that they had vanished as the Greeks and Romans have
vanished, leaving only empty spaces behind, which the surviving tribes
neither fill nor comprehend.

"A rare old lot of dust; eh, Miss Chetwood? I wish we could travel by
night, but you can't trust this blooming old Irrawaddy after sundown.
Charts are so much waste-paper. You just have to know the old lady.
Bars rise in a night, shift this side and that. But the days are all
right. No dust when you get in mid-stream. What?"

"I never cease wondering how those poor coolies can carry those heavy
rice-bags," she replied to the purser.

"Oh, they are used to it," carelessly.

The great gray stack of paddy-bags seemed, in the eyes of the girl,
fairly to melt away.

"By Jove!" exclaimed the purser. "There's Parrot & Co.!" He laughed
and pointed toward one of the torches.

"Parrot & Co.? I do n