gland as I have some small business with him. Yours obedient
servant,--WUN SING."

"It can't be forgery," she reflected, "since there isn't a Wun Sing,"
and added an artistic postscript, "Boots and shoes verry much cheap
for cash." She made up the envelope to match, and addressed it with
consistent illiteracy to the head of the Mission. The son of the Chinese
basketmaker, who dwelt almost next door, spoke neither English
nor Hindustani, but showed an easy comprehension of her promise of
backsheesh when he should return with an answer. She had a joyful
anticipation, while she waited, of the terms in which she should tell
Arnold how she passed disguised as a Chinese shoemaker, before the
receptive and courteous consciousness of his spiritual senior; of how
she penetrated, in the suggestion of a pigtail and an unpaid bill,
within the last portals that might be expected to receive her in the
form under which, for example, certain black and yellow posters were
presenting her to the public at that moment. She saw his scruples go
swiftly down before her laughter and the argument of her tender anxiety,
which she was quite prepared to learn foolish and unnecessary. There was
even an adventurous instant in which she reaped at actual personation of
the Chinaman, and she looked in rapture at the vivid risk of the thing
before she abandoned it as involving too much. She sent no receipt
form this time--that was not the practice of the bazar--and when, hours
after, her messenger returned with weariness and dejection written upon
him, in the characters of a perfunctory Chinese smile, she could only
gather from his negative head and hands that no answer had been given
him, and that her expedient had failed.

Hilda stared at her dilemma. Its properties were curiously simple.
His world and hers, with the same orbit, had no point of contact. Once
swinging round their eastern centre they had come close enough for these
two, leaning very far out, to join hands. When they loosed it seemed
they lost.

The more she gazed at it the more it looked a preposterous thing that in
a city vibrant with human communication by all the methods which make it
easy, it should be possible for one individual thus to drop suddenly
and completely from the knowledge of another--a mediaeval thing. Their
isolation as Europeans of course accounted for it; there was no medium
in the brown population that hummed in the city streets. Hilda could not
even bribe a se