with his troops clustered
at his back sees in front, and behind, on either side of him, the
glitter of bayonets in the bushes.

She was in the midst of the tangled traffic of Kearney Street. Swimming
lights and crowds were all around her. She peered forth cautiously upon
it. She saw a florid face, a woman, she knew casually--and there her
eyes fastened, not for the woman's brilliant presence, but for what she
saw directly in front of it, thrown into relief upon its background--a
short and shabby figure, foreign, equivocal, reticent, the figure of a
blue-eyed Chinaman.

He was standing still while the crowd flowed past him. This time he was
alone. He seemed to be waiting, yet not to watch, as if he had already
seen what he was expecting and knew that it must pass his way. It was
uncanny, his reappearance, at a second interval of her route, standing
as if he had stood there from the first, patient, expectant, motionless.
It was worse than uncanny.

All at once an idea, wild and illogical enough, jumped up in her mind.
Couldn't this miserable vehicle that was lumbering like a disabled bug
move faster and rattle her on out of reach of the glare, the publicity,
the threat of discovery, and, above all, of her discomforting notion?
She breathed out relief as the carriage dipped into the comparative
quiet again, and she felt herself being driven on and up a gently rising
street between block-apart, lone gas-lamps. She thrust her face as far
out of the window as she dared, looking back at the lights and traffic
which were drifting behind her. At this distance she could single out no
one figure from the crowd, and no figure which could possibly be that of
the blue-eyed Chinaman was moving up the street behind her. There only
remained a disquieting memory of him on the corner with Harry. Together
they made a combination, to her mind, threatening to the man she loved,
for whom she so desperately feared.

If ever she had felt herself helpless, it was in this moment passing
along the half-lit, half-empty city street. By what she knew, by what
she wore around her neck, she was separated from all peace-abiding
citizens--she was outlawed. Every closed door and shaded window (so many
she had opened or looked out of!) now seemed shut and shaded against her
for ever. Night and the reticent gray city, averting their eyes, let
her slip through unregarded.

She was passing that section of large, old-fashioned mansions, cupolaed,
towere