unusual intentness. Involuntarily her hand strayed to the thin streaks of hair on her temples, and thence descended to straighten the brooch beneath her collar. "You're looking very well to-day, Miss Bunner," said Mr. Ramy, following her gesture with a smile.

"Oh," said Ann Eliza nervously. "I'm always well in health," she added.

"I guess you're healthier than your sister, even if you are less sizeable." "Oh, I don't know. Evelina's a mite nervous sometimes, but she ain't a bit sickly."

"She eats heartier than you do; but that don't mean nothing," said Mr. Ramy. Ann Eliza was silent. She could not follow the trend of his thought, and she did not care to commit herself farther about Evelina before she had ascertained if Mr. Ramy considered nervousness interesting or the reverse.

But Mr. Ramy spared her all farther indecision.

"Well, Miss Bunner," he said, drawing his stool closer to the counter, "I guess I might as well tell you fust as last what I come here for to-day. I want to get married."

Ann Eliza, in many a prayerful midnight hour, had sought to strengthen herself for the hearing of this avowal, but now that it had come she felt pitifully frightened and unprepared. Mr. Ramy was leaning with both elbows on the counter, and she noticed that his nails were clean and that he had brushed his hat; yet even these signs had not prepared her!

At last she heard herself say, with a dry throat in which her heart was hammering: "Mercy me, Mr. Ramy!"

"I want to get married," he repeated. "I'm too lonesome. It ain't good for a man to live all alone, and eat noding but cold meat every day."

"No," said Ann Eliza softly.
"And the dust fairly beats me."
"Oh, the dust-I know!"

Mr. Ramy stretched one of his bluntfingered hands toward her. "I wisht you'd take me."

Still Ann Eliza did not understand. She rose hesitatingly from her seat, pushing aside the basket of buttons which lay between them; then she perceived that Mr. Ramy was trying to take her hand, and as their fingers met a flood of joy swept

over her. Never afterward, though every other word of their interview was stamped on her memory beyond all possible forgetting, could she recall what he said while their hands touched; she only knew that she seemed to be floating on a summer sea, and that all its waves were in her ears. "Me-me?" she gasped.

"I guess so," said her suitor placidly. "You suit me right down to the ground, Miss Bunner. Dat's the truth."

A woman passing along the street paused to look at the shop-window, and Ann Eliza half hoped she would come in; but after a desultory inspection she went on.

"Maybe you don't fancy me?" Mr. Ramy suggested, discountenanced by Ann Eliza's silence.

A word of assent was on her tongue, but her lips refused it. She must find some other way of telling him.

"I don't say that."

"Well, I always kinder thought we was suited to one another," Mr. Ramy continued, eased of his momentary doubt. "I always liked de quiet style-no fuss and airs, and not afraid of work." He spoke as though dispassionately cataloguing her charms.

Ann Eliza felt that she must make an end. "But, Mr. Ramy, you don't understand. I've never thought of marrying." Mr. Ramy looked at her in surprise. "Why not?"

"Well, I don't know, har'ly." She moistened her twitching lips. "The fact is, I ain't as active as I look. Maybe I couldn't stand the care. I ain't as spry as Evelina-nor as young," she added, with a last great effort.

"But you do most of de work here, anyways," said her suitor doubtfully.

"Oh, well, that's because Evelina's busy outside; and where there's only two women the work don't amount to much. Besides, I'm the oldest; I have to look after things," she hastened on, half pained that her simple ruse should so readily deceive him.

"Well, I guess you're active enough for me," he persisted. His calm determination began to frighten her; she trembled lest her own should be less staunch.

"No, no," she repeated, feeling the tears on her lashes. "I couldn't, Mr. Ramy, I couldn't marry. I'm so sur

prised. I always thought it was Evelina always. And so did everybody else. She's so bright and pretty-it seemed so natural."

"Well, you was all mistaken," said Mr. Ramy obstinately.

"I'm so sorry."

He rose, pushing back his chair. "You'd better think it over," he said, in the large tone of a man who feels he may safely wait.

"Oh, no, no. It ain't any sorter use, Mr. Ramy. I don't never mean to marry. I get tired so easily-I'd be afraid of the work. And I have such awful headaches." She paused, racking her brain for more convincing infirmities.

"Headaches, do you?" said Mr. Ramy, turning back.

"My, yes, awful ones, that I have to give right up to. Evelina has to do everything when I have one of them headaches. She has to bring me my tea in the mornings."

"Well, I'm sorry to hear it," said Mr. Ramy.

"Thank you kindly all the same," Ann Eliza murmured. "And please don't don't " She stopped suddenly, looking at him through her tears.

"Oh, that's all right," he answered. "Don't you fret, Miss Bunner. Folks have got to suit themselves." She thought his tone had grown more resigned since she had spoken of her headaches.

For some moments he stood looking at her with a hesitating eye, as though uncertain how to end their conversation; and at length she found courage to say (in the words of a novel she had once read): "I don't want this should make any difference between us."

"Oh, my, no," said Mr. Ramy, absently picking up his hat.

"You'll come in just the same?" she continued, nerving herself to the effort. "We'd miss you awfully if you didn't. Evelina, she" She paused, torn between her desire to turn his thoughts to Evelina, and the dread of prematurely disclosing her sister's secret.

"Don't Miss Evelina have no headaches?" Mr. Ramy suddenly asked.

"My, no, never-well, not to speak of, anyway. She ain't had one for ages, and

when Evelina is sick she won't never give in to it," Ann Eliza declared, making some hurried adjustments with her conscience.

"I wouldn't have thought that," said Mr. Ramy.

"I guess you don't know us as well as you thought you did."

"Well, no, that's so; maybe I don't. I'll wish you good day, Miss Bunner"; and Mr. Ramy moved toward the door.

"Good day, Mr. Ramy," Ann Eliza answered.

She felt unutterably thankful to be alone. She knew the crucial moment of her life had passed, and she was glad that she had not fallen below her own ideals. It had been a wonderful experience, full of undreamed-of fear and fascination; and in spite of the tears on her cheeks she was not sorry to have known it. Two facts, however, took the edge from its perfection: that it had happened in the shop, and that she had not had on her black silk.

She passed the next hour in a state of dreamy ecstasy. Something had entered into her life of which no subsequent empoverishment could rob it: she glowed with the same rich sense of possessorship that once, as a little girl, she had felt when her mother had given her a gold locket and she had sat up in bed in the dark to draw it from its hiding-place beneath her night-gown.

At length a dread of Evelina's return began to mingle with these musings. How could she meet her younger sister's eye without betraying what had happened? She felt as though a visible glory lay on her, and she was glad that dusk had fallen when Evelina entered. But her fears were superfluous. Evelina, always selfabsorbed, had of late lost all interest in the simple happenings of the shop, and Ann Eliza, with mingled mortification and relief, perceived that she was in no danger of being cross-questioned as to the events of the afternoon. She was glad of this; yet there was a touch of humiliation in finding that the portentous secret in her bosom did not visibly shine forth. struck her as dull, and even slightly absurd, of Evelina not to know at last that they were equals.

It

TH

HIS is a story told me by Pat Evans as we sat by a sun-splashed gravel walk in the Shanghai Public Gardens. I wish I could tell it as he did, but I lack the vocabulary and the pungent slang of the Seven Tongues. Evans is a tall man, whose long, thin mouth writhes like an angleworm in its effort to keep up with the moods that sparkle from his dark eyes. He practises the extreme leisure

only enjoyed by the very rich and the very indigent of the Model Settlement, and lavishes much of his time and conversation upon me, to my lasting edification.

It was a lovely morning, with the gardens crowded by the children of the port, who, under the blank-eyed watchfulness of their amahs, hunted for mud-turtles and chased fiddler-crabs to their lairs.

The April sun turned every yellow wavelet of the Soo Chow creek into a heliograph, and the air was tepidly urging the two of us to the inviting of our ease, when Evans made out the Bannisters-John Bannister of Liao Shan and his wife. As their carriage rolled over the Victoria Bridge, Pat told me rapidly how they came down to Shanghai every spring, just as soon as the ice was out at Liao Shan; how they always rode in the victoria, even when travelling the three hundred yards between the Astor House and the gardens ("There's only a quarter of a mile of macadam in all Liao Shan," explained Evans, "so they never get a chance to drive there"); and how John Bannister possessed thirty blue-serge suits, all exactly alike.

"Look-see as they go by the fence," he concluded. "Tell me what you think of 'em."

I stared at the two as their victoria dawdled past, its silver trappings aglimmer in the sun. His hair was slightly grizzled, his face lined with the wrinkles of the commander. The close-fitting blue suit seemed to hint that its twenty-nine brethren had all but exhausted the serge supply before its turn for cutting. And as for her, her gray tailor-made shrieked Rue-de-la-Paix from every seam, the northern complexion was a rose in the midst of the abounding Shanghai sallowness, and her hair rolled into the depths of her hat like a golden tidal wave. Dainty she was, and fair-the kind of woman you associate with elusive jasmine perfume. Evans looked at me quizzically.

"Well?"

"Do they do they get along together?"

"Wait."

In an instant they came down the walk together-carriages are not tolerated in the gardens-the gravel sliding under their feet. Very gravely they nodded to Evans. Very gravely he returned their bow. And I, leaning hard against the bench back, looked and looked and wondered. Evans grinned understandingly. "I think it's their walk," he explained. "Did you see how they step out from the hip? Only free people walk that way."

But I knew better. I had seen their

eyes with something that burned clear and warm and tawny under the outer blue. There was the bond, the oneness, that held them together. They both had it, that glow that gave them the appearance of being alone in the world, of being elevated above a sun-tanned desert of humanity over which they-by virtue of each other-could preside. And I felt that Evans, for all his attempted ingenuousness as to their walk, knew where the real twinship lay between them.

"It's their eyes, Pat," I corrected patiently. "Tell me how they got that light back of 'em."

"Bannister's always had it. It means victory-victory over yourself and all the world. I-I call it the golden glow of victory." Evans is usually quite unabashed in his fantasies.

"But what about the woman?"

And then he cast his diffidence aside and plunged in.

Madge Kerrigan-her maiden name was Kerrigan reached Liao Shan in the spring of nineteen-seven, a slip of a girl who could wear clothes, drive men crazy, and do very little else.

"Just a type," explained Evans-"just a type. You see'em come through in shoals, at the Astor here, at the Wagons Lits in Peking. Their eyes can't laugh y'know; just glazed and dead. They've only touched at the rim of things, and they don't understand. That's it; they just don't know."

"Don't know what?" "Oh-everything.' Then thoughtfully: "Wish to God I knew. Maskee! That b'long Madge."

Of course Madge was not alone. There were Pa and Ma Kerrigan-so called out of sheer appropriateness-and a young man who had thrown up a good billet with the Russo-Asiatic Bank in Hankow to follow in Madge's train. An upstanding chap he was, full of the glory and foolishness of his four-and-twenty years, who, previous to Madge's advent, had rejoiced in an endless capacity for Scotchesand-sodas and for semi-platonic affairs with any married woman available "an out-an'-out drottle," summed up Evans, as if the word contained it all. From Hankow on he had tagged faithfully after

Madge-perhaps the worst thing he could have done, as his following enabled her to postpone a decision. "She just didn't know," Pat conclusively explained.

When they arrived at Liao Shan, however, and the Kerrigans, thanks to a bale of credentials carried by ma in her official capacity she was the niece of a cousin of an ex-vice-president-were installed as guests in the Consulate, a complication was introduced. Bannister was the complication.

By infinite tact and resource Mrs. Blake managed to unearth him from the big, white-stuccoed barn that was part dwelling, part office, part warehouse, and to shepherd him into a dinner-party. He sat through it like a granite rock, smoked three cigars after the women had gone out, and proposed to Madge Kerrigan the next day. All Liao Shan settled back gleefully to watch the race.

It was a neck-and-neck affair. Madge frowned on The Drottle because she had had so much of his kind of infatuation at home. Also she smiled on him because he was the only specimen of his type available. As for Bannister, sometimes she called his attitude "egotistic assurance," sometimes she referred to it as "iron determination," and spoke of "superhuman inflexibility of purpose." Madge liked that kind of speech. She was fascinated by the big man with the yellow glow behind his eyes, but there was a blundering solidity about him that held her off; and the race resolved itself into a series of spurts, with neither man leading very far.

At first it was largely Drottle. He used to take Madge out to the tennis-courts every afternoon-he had the figure and elasticity of a white corset stay-and together they would hammer the local talent; while Bannister would sit in the pavilion, scald himself out with tea, and glower at his rival. Two weeks it lasted, and then the big north-of-England man countered with the Ho Feng.

Ho Feng means "river breeze." She was the survivor from the wreck of an unsuccessful wharfage company of Bannister's a seventy-foot tug with a temperamental, double - expansion engine. Her owner took her and crowded a topheavy, comfortable deck-house on her

stern and cleared a little space forward as a deck. Then he fitted her out with a Japanese crew-they were smarter, he said, and he never expected to rely on them-two quarter-ton anchors, a firefighting equipment, and, in addition to the twenty-foot gig that towed behind on an inch-and-a-half hawser, stowed a small dory-he boasted that it could ride out any gale-on her cabin roof. It was all typically Bannisterian. Liao Shan giggled at the result and urged him to complete her with a hurricane-deck.

The move worked for a while. All the mixed-doubles combinations of the port had about admitted the mastery of Madge and her partner, and she was looking for other worlds to conquer. And so, most afternoons at four, you could see the Ho Feng pull out from the Hai Chang wharf and go puffing and blowing-she was a scandalous coal-eater-up or down the river, as the case might be. "The water is just as muddy as this," said Evans, pointing to the lapping wavelets of the creek at our feet, "and that made the Ho Feng look all the whiter."

Perhaps it was the mud that fed Madge up with it at last. Perhaps it was the sameness-you can only go two ways on a river. But, finally, she commenced to talk of the joy of seeing blue water again, so Bannister got out his very complete sets of admiralty charts, went down and patted the engine encouragingly, and told his lowdah, Yoshino, to stock up for a week-end trip of fifty miles down the coast to clear water and Tower Hill.

And when Saturday came, beaming and bright, Bannister crammed the Kerrigans, the Blakes, and The Drottle-he was tactician enough to include his rival-upon the tiny poop, and, with much panting of exhaust and belching of Fu Shun coal smoke, they bobbed down the river, with the engine and tide shaking a fair twelve knots out of her, with every one gulping down the fresh, salt air and watching for the mud to fade out of the sea. Down the channel and across the bar they crawled; and they were just making out Lung Chou-that's the promontory just this side of Tower Hill-and the water was beginning to sallow, when the on-shore squall broke on them.

"You savvy Gulf of Pechili," Evans