ing can know as much as you do!" she
exclaimed, with a look that Buddha might have envied.

"Even I make mistakes occasionally," said Percival, modestly. "Can't
always be right, you know."

"But you are," she persisted; "you are always abominably right, and I am
always wrong."

"Adorably wrong," amended Percival, assisting with the tea-things.

"Two, three, four?" she asked, holding up the sugar-tongs.

"Doesn't matter so long as I have you to look at."

Now, when an Englishman ceases to be particular about the amount of
sugar in his tea, you may know he is very far gone indeed. By the time
he had drained three cups of the jasmine-scented beverage and basked in
the brilliance of Bobby's smiles through the smoking of two cigars, he
was feeling decidedly heady.

"If we are going to the races, we really _must_ start," declared
Bobby when she found the situation getting difficult.

"What's the use of going anywhere?" asked Percival, blowing one ring of
smoke through another.

"Why, we are seeing the sights of Shanghai. You said you were crazy
about China."

"So I am. You are quite determined on the races?"

"Quite," said Bobby.

Their way to the track lay along the famous Bubbling Well Road, and as
they bowled along in a somewhat imposing victoria, with a couple of
liveried Chinamen on the box, Bobby sat bolt upright, her cheeks
flushed, and her eager eyes drinking in the sights.

It was a scene sufficiently gay to hold the interest of a much more
sophisticated person than the untraveled young lady from Wyoming. The
whole of society, it appeared, was on route to the races. The road was
thronged with smart traps full of brilliantly dressed people of every
nationality. There were gay parties from the various legations, French,
Russian, Japanese, German, English, American. In and out among the
whirling wheels of the foreigners poured the unending procession of
native life, unperturbed, unconcerned. A Chinese lady in black satin
trousers and gorgeous embroidered coat, wearing a magnificent head-dress
of jade and pearls, rode side by side with a coolie who trundled a
wheelbarrow which carried his wife on one side and his week's provisions
on the other. Water-carriers, street vendors, jinrikisha-runners, women
with bound feet, children on foot, and children strapped on the backs of
their mothers, crossed and recrossed, surged in and out.

But the Honorable Percival concerned himself little with these petty
detai