em. More raced in from the muddy bund.

"What are we going to do?" she groaned.

"We are going to cable your mother that you are starting for home by
the first steamer," Peter cried, swinging her into the cleanest and
most comfortable rickshaw of the lot. "The _Mongolia_ sails this
afternoon."

"What will become of you?" she demanded.

Peter gave her his ingenuous smile. "I will vanish--for a while.
Otherwise I may vanish--permanently."

Miss Lorimer reached out with her small white hand and touched his
sleeve. They were jouncing over the Su-Chow bridge, on their way to
the American Consulate. "Won't I see you again? Ever?" She looked
bewildered and lost, as if this strange old land had proved too much
for her powers of readjustment. Her rosebud mouth seemed to quiver.
"Are you in danger, Mr. Moore?"

Peter glimpsed a very yellow, supercilious face swinging in his
direction from the padding throng.

"A little, perhaps," he conceded.

"Because of me?"

The yellow face reappeared and was swallowed again by the crowd, as a
speck of mud is engulfed by the Yangtze.

Miss Lorimer repeated her question. Peter shook his head in an
extravagant denial, and helped her down from the rickshaw. They had
stopped before the consulate in the American quarter.

"I'm leaving you here," he said.

"But--but I like you!" her small voice faltered. "Aren't you going to
explain--anything? Is this--is this all?"

Peter smothered his rising feelings under an air of important haste.
"Your way lies there"--he pointed down river. "For the present mine
lies here"--and he jerked a thumb in the general direction of
Shanghai's narrow muddy alleys.

"Shall I--won't you--gracious!" Miss Lorimer stared into her left
hand. Two one-thousand-dollar Bank of China bills were folded upon it.
She was confused. When she looked back the young man who had
miraculously delivered her from an unguessable fate had been spirited
with Oriental magic from her sight.

CHAPTER IX

The bund of Shanghai was striped with the long, purple shadows of
coming night, a night which seemed to be creeping out of the heart of
the land, ushering with it a feeling of subtle tension, as though the
touch of darkness stirred to wakefulness a populace of shadows, which
skulked and crouched and whispered, comprising an underworld of
sinister folk which the first glow of dawn would send scampering back
to a thousand evil-smelling hiding-places.

The