are, this scene just past. What an
incredible, a preposterous request for a woman to make! And the more
thought he fed to the enigma the more incredible and unreal it became.

It was too big and complex a thought to hold all together in his tired
brain now. In the morning he would tackle it with some zest, with an
inner eye washed clean by a long sleep. Just now he felt the need of
relaxation, and as he smoked, his thoughts flitted afar, to come back
now and then, irresistibly drawn by the vivid picture painted in his
mind by Romola Borria.

His eyes, commanders of his thoughts, traveled out over the stern,
which rose and sank with a ponderous, wallowing sound in the heaving
ground swells, and he made out the weaving and coiling, the lustrous
but dim windings of the phosphorescent wake.

As he became more accustomed to the shadowy, pointed darkness of the
steerage cabins, he became aware of a small figure crouching on the
hatch-cover near the starboard rail. He studied this intently, and at
length he made out the long, black queue of the Chinese girl who had
stared at him in such bewitching fashion a little earlier in the day.

And his mind was carried back at the thought of this small maiden to
the grim and red Tibetan city, whose memories now were scarcely more
than a confused and hideous dream. He pictured again the splendors of
the blue-domed white palace which reposed like a beast of prey atop the
red filth disgorged by the cinnabar mine.

Peter's heart thumped in youthful resentment as the thought of that
evil spirit came to him now. When would he meet the Gray Dragon face
to face? When would he again penetrate the stronghold of that unhappy
red city? Who could say? Probably never.

The small Chinese girl on the hatch-cover had found him staring at her,
and with a little shiver of surprise Peter made the discovery that she
was smiling archly at him; and she inclined her head. She was
beckoning? It seemed so, indeed.

Because Peter was a youth of deep and subtle understandings, he did no
more than nod slightly, and forthwith descended the companion-ladder to
the well, and crossed the well to her side.

Her eyes were given a queer little twinkle by the near-by electric
which burned dimly over the door of the engine-room galley, and she
motioned him to be seated. He squatted, Chinese fashion, and she took
a deep, sighing breath, holding out her hands with a quick gesture.

Across her wrists and