Again the silence fell, until Baldeau agreed gravely: "Yes, there is no remedy." Then his thoughts shifted back to himself. "And you, you also have found yourself alone?"

"I also," assented the German. Then he elaborated: "But all men are alone, nicht wahr? We are not but animals to others. To be himself man must be alone." And he summed up his argument once again: "Mei-yu fa-tzu."

And Baldeau, breathing in the atmosphere of friendship with the smoke of his manila, nodded his agreement.

He went home late, his head high, drinking in great drafts of the nightsteeped air, feeling that he was at the beginning of things. And so he was. All the long summer he spent his evenings behind the tamarisk clump, for the most part listening to Rentloff as, in his rumbling bass, the German passed judgments, definite and gentle all, on men and deeds and times. Bit by bit he learned much of Rentloff too, of Minna and of Ying Hua, and of his life that had been before. He learned to endure the nightly kiss for the clean, silent Chinawoman with no more than a flicker of the eye to indicate the discomfort of his soul. He learned of his host's beliefs-Theorien Rentloff called them-the beliefs that had exiled him from Oberantelhoh. "I was idealist," the Bavarian would say. "I was idealist, and I could not suffer the war service. I was young, and I thought them"-with a wave of his hand he indicated many of "them" of high rank and of exalted fame "I thought them wrong. Now I think they were only mistaken. They do not know." And even to Baldeau, to him who had served his time, served it ungrudgingly and carried a jingal-ball planted there in his ankle, even to Baldeau he seemed justified in his fleeing of the Empire's armies.

Yes, it was a glorious summer, with the Ta Tu-tzu coming every three weeks and leaving on all her trips some fifty dollars clear to be added to the dot which must equal that of Aude. And then one day Baldeau received a document appointing him consular agent for France, and he broke out the tricolor at the top of a modest staff in his compound. And finally, in July it was, there came a time when the

dowry was complete and changed into good French gold; and Baldeau put himself to his final task of saving fifteen hundred francs, six hundred odd dollars, to pay Aude's passage to the East. In Marseilles, as marked on the big wall map in his office, he stuck a pin, and he advanced it along the steamer route to Shanghai in proportion as the passage money grew. And then-then came chaos. At the first rumors he repaired to Rentloff.

"Yes," said the German, "yes, it is war. It will be a terrible and a hard." He stopped for an instant, then went on reflectively: "Yes, they will even want me. See, here is a paper. They will forgive my desertion-they call me deserter— they forgive me it if I report at Tsing Tao at once."

Baldeau was silent as he chose his words aright. "I regret it," he pronounced at last. "But you, now you can return to Min-to Oberantelhoh-when it is over. It is better so.'

"I? I do not go to Tsing Tao."
"But-and your country?"

"My country mistakes. They mistake. They do not know. Here"-he pointed to his head-"here it tells me that I cannot go. And so I shall stay here." In the final rise of his voice there was more than the usual German note of expectancy.

But Baldeau did not heed the glance that sought his tolerance, his friendship; he was intent on presencing the crumbling of a god. And then, out of the chaos that was himself, he heard a voice that seemed his own. "I regret it. The enemy of my country I can respect. It is necessary to despise the enemy of his own country. I regret it." And he turned on his heel and left, regardless of how Rentloff's eyes were focussed on infinity, and fighting vaguely at the sorrow that possessed him.

But he did fight it down. For the three months that followed, the life of Liao Shan might have been regulated by the comings and goings of the Ta Tu-tzu. Every three weeks she would leave, bound South, the red of her underbody looming high in the air, her half-naked propellor chopping at the brown river, her strong-box heavy with the passage moneys of a thousand Southern coolies, bound for their native Shangtung after

"The enemy

laboring for the summer in the Manchurian fields. And the Frenchman added to the labor of it all by a careful overhauling of ship and of cargo on each return. For she was precious, this ship of Baldeau's, and were there not complots abroad against French ships, and against France? And did he not represent the France? Had there not been a camel expedition from Peking against the Trans

Siberian Railway? Should not one be on guard against all this? Eh, well! And Baldeau was busy, very busy, too busy to think of the red-shuttered house and of its garrison until came November and the first ice, and the buoys had been taken up from the channel and officially the port was pronounced closed. Winter had

come.

Then it was that Baldeau began to take

stock of himself and to realize the void that Rentloff had left in his life. Slowly he became conscious of it, and just as slowly there arose in him unrest and, with the longing that he did not dare express, a great disgust. It was Rentloff who was responsible. How it was he did not know, he did not dare to ask. But it was Rentloff, clearly Rentloff, who had left him thus alone. And he began to hate Rentloff, to hate him with an anxious, restless hate that he laid to his nationality, his perfidy, his weakness, everywhere except to himself, Baldeau. And, hate him as he might, he could not throw off the fascination that there was for him in the man, and he but hated him the more for it. And he was very much alone.

Day after day Baldeau would take his seat in the little dusty office the godowns were empty now, and the river a sheet of ice that thickened every dayand at his desk he would transact his few shreds of business. Then his gaze would wander to the big steamer chart, with the pin that was Aude stuck just short of Colombo. That pin had not moved since the close of navigation, nor would it stir until the spring brought the Ta Tu-tzu back to him. And then, on the pretext of examining the great convoys of bean-carts that streamed by, each balanced on its six-spoked wheels and tugged by its mass of shaggy ponies, his glance would stray out of the window, only to bring up against the red shutters and the redrimmed panes of Rentloff's windows. And he would invoke God's thousand thunders on his curiosity-and turn to look again.

Came a day when, as he looked, he found those red shutters closed tight. Rentloff would be sick, he felt, or gone. Perhaps he was gone, gone to serve his emperor, to be hated legitimately. Baldeau made cunning inquiries from his own servants. No, they told him, the master of Te Mao had not left. He was hurt, he was at his bed. He had run on his iron shoes over the river, very far, and now had spoiled his ankle and suffered cold. And Baldeau, beginning at Tai-tzuwhich is very downright even for Chinese -ran the astonished coolie through the whole upper category of revilings, and left him.

But he could not keep himself away from the dusty office that commanded a view of Rentloff's dwelling; and that night found him there, turning the pages of a tattered Vie Parisienne. Slowly, but as always, his eyes sought the window, and in it the space where Rentloff's house would be. Then his gaze halted and he started, for one of the windows-one of those that had been barred all day long, it is understood-had become the frame of a yellow square of light. And as he looked he felt that that light had always been there, that all the nights since August it had been there, and that Rentloff had meant it for him, Baldeau. The next day the house was the same all the windows were screened from the sunlightall save one, the one of the yellow light. And so it was the day after. On the next morning the Frenchman noticed that the shutters were flung wide-Rentloff was well-but that night they were all closed again except the one that flung out the light. And Baldeau, convinced now that it was to him the German called, loathed him the more; for, he told himself, Rentloff was not only to be hated for his stubborn strength but to be despised for his weakness. And he scourged himself with his loneliness and gloried in the pain.

Slowly the winter wore away. Baldeau with his maimed ankle was tethered to his house, close to Rentloff. There he stayed, looking at the red-garnished windows by day, at the square of light by night. There was no escape, and the insistence of the lamp's plea awoke in him only a dull spirit of bitter remonstrance. That German-why should he put himself always in the face of him, Baldeau? And he prayed for the coming of the Ta Tu-tzu with the spring.

This last came slowly, but at last there was a day when the lifting of the tide broke out the ice as far as the port's wharves, and, swirling the floes boisterously on its brown waters, the river floated them as tokens of its strength triumphantly down to sea. And with the going of the ice came the ships-tall ships sunk low. Eagerly they ploughed their way in, buffeting with the ice; and having moored at their wharves they let themselves be disgorged by clamoring crews of coolies. Amongst them, in the forefront,

did the tearing. Wire of any sort has nothing to do with piece goods, least of all insulated wire suitable for small battery work. With his mind aflame the Frenchman investigated, and found two more bales marked Triangle X, with artfully hollowed centre that held fifty pounds each of greasy, yellow-wrapped bars, carefully packed, that bore the stamp, "Du Pont-Explosive."

And so, when a wordy native, giving the name of Ah Ling Fu, called for the bales, Baldeau questioned him a little. He was in haste, declared the Chinese. Those bales were samples to be taken to Chang Chun to-morrow, and he, the mean petitioner, had much to do before then. Chang Chun, reflected the Frenchman, was on the road to Harbin, and Harbin was on the Trans-Siberian, and if a TransSiberian bridge should go He gave the man his consignment and spent the morning over three telegrams-to the French consul at Shanghai, to the Japanese colonel at Chang Chun, and to the Russian general officer commanding at Harbin. After which he returned to the Ta Tu-tzu and her loading.

"Hein !" he snorted, triumphant, "our road of iron, he does not go up, pouff!" and he busied himself for the next two days, his sturdy legs keeping a pace ahead of his sturdy thoughts, until the bean-cake crammed in the Ta Tu-tzu's hold pressed her down in the thin, fresh water of the river with her Plimsoll mark half a foot beneath the surface. Then he watched her around the bend as she trumpeted joyously for her papers, parting the mush ice with her fore feet, rejoicing in her lordship of the seas, and he turned back deliberately to glory in his triumph.

Eh, well, one could vaunt himself a little over an affair like this. If one was at home now, in the field, or if one was younger, such things and more would be the expected. But down here, when one was old and fat and had a Tonkinese jingal-ball in his ankle, oh, it would go

And they, they of the club, who laughed and talked of "our allies," and boasted of the Carpathian passes as if they themselves had forced them. Bah! What had one of them, yes, all of them, done that would equal this? Not that it made a great noise, it is understood, but when

one is old and limps Not that they must know. Afterward, perhaps; but now, no, not even Rentloff, who hated the Hohenzollern most- But why was it always a question of Rentloff, Rentloff, Rentloff? Reflexively he gazed at the window. There, fifty yards away in the night, was the yellow oblong of the German's window. Baldeau crammed his gaze back within his own four walls.

He woke the next morning to find the earth in an honest sweat, ridding itself of the winter's chill. For once there was moisture in the air, for once the trees and houses did not stand out as if cut from cardboard and placed before a monotonous back drop of whitish blue. The horizon blurred now; the nakedness of the land had gone and the edges of the plain were hidden by a veil of vapor, thin, unpierceable, inviting the eye to plumb it, speaking of what it hid in terms of mystery. In the road outside Baldeau's compound the belated bean-carts splashed heartily through the mud that before, stiffened with ice, had only crumbled beneath their wheels and grasped them by the hubs. From high over the city, their bodies hidden in the mist, an occasional gaggle of geese sent down their strident call of northward ho! to the tundra, to the mating! as their phalanx ploughed through the steamy air.

It was spring in Normandy, reflected Baldeau. The ditches were beginning to stir with the restless life of six months' span; and their banks were splotched with the yellow of the buttons of gold, the buttercups; and the poplars were ashimmer with the spring. And Aude would be there waiting, even as he waited. And did she find herself alone, all alone, he wondered?

Then it was that his eyes, in company with his thoughts, crept back from looking over the horizon's edge. Then it was that he noticed that every shutter in Rentloff's house was closed and barred. For an instant he stared uncomprehendingly, then he explained it to himself. He is fallen sick again, Rentloff. My sympathies But he checked himself. His sympathies! Bah! And he turned to his dusty desk and shuffled papers until he was sick of them; then went out into his compound and supervised Huang, the