the doctor's warning that the real battle would begin
when the patient recovered consciousness. "You have all the world
before you."

"Rather behind me;" and he spoke no more that morning.

Throughout the afternoon, while the doctor was giving her the first
lesson out of his profound knowledge of life, her interest would
break away continually, despite her honest efforts to pin it down
to the facts so patiently elucidated for her. Recurrently she
heard: "I don't know; I really don't know." It was curiously like
the intermittent murmur of the surf, those weird Sundays, when her
father paused for breath to launch additional damnation for those
who disobeyed the Word. "I don't know; I really don't know."

Her ear caught much of the lesson, and many things she stored away;
but often what she heard was sound without sense. Still, her face
never betrayed this distraction. And what was singular she did not
recount to the doctor that morning's adventure. Why? If she had put
the query to herself, she could not have answered it. It was in no
sense confessional; it was a state of mind in the patient the
doctor had already anticipated. Yet she held her tongue.

As for the doctor, he found a pleasure in this service that would
have puzzled him had he paused to analyse it. There was scant
social life on the Sha-mien aside from masculine foregatherings,
little that interested him. He took his social pleasures once a
year in Hong-Kong, after Easter. He saw, without any particular
regret, that this year he would have to forego the junket; but
there would be ample compensation in the study of these queer
youngsters. Besides, by the time they were off his hands, old
McClintock would be dropping in to have his liver renovated.

All at once he recollected the fact that McClintock's copra
plantation was down that way, somewhere in the South Seas; had an
island of his own. Perhaps he had heard of this Enschede. Mac--the
old gossip--knew about everything going on in that part of the
world; and if Enschede was anything up to the picture the girl had
drawn, McClintock would have heard of him, naturally. He might
solve the riddle. All of which proves that the doctor also had his
moments of distraction, with this difference: he was not distracted
from his subject matter.

"So endeth the first lesson," he said. "Suppose we go and have tea?
I'd like to take you to a teahouse I know, but we'll go to the
Victoria instead. I must practise what