She disembarked them. She paid the boatmen. She tidied her mistress, and tidied Basil as best she could. She got them up the Peak, and she smuggled them into the hotel at last, almost unobserved.

“Too tlired talk to-night,” she told Hilda imperatively. And she said it as imperatively to Robert Gregory himself when he hurried in from the office in answer to Hilda’s telephoned good news.

It was Ah Wong who sent the news of Basil Gregory’s safe return spreading like wildest fire through gossipy Hong Kong—not only the news of the return but the detailed story of his absence. It was a very pretty story, and beautifully simple: nothing more out of the common than a slightly sprained ankle and an undelivered chit. The chit had been entrusted to one vellee bad coolie man—needless to say, a victim of the opium habit of which one hears so much in books on China and sees so absurdly little in China itself. Some believed the story—as started by Ah Wong—some did not. But it might have been true (a merit such fabrications often lack) and it served, although one cynic at the English Club said of it that it reminded him of the curate’s celebrated egg, “quite good in parts.”

And John Bradley wondered.

But the next day the Gregorys and their affairs were well-nigh forgotten in the greater flare of news that flamed from the mainland. Mr. Wu was dead, and so was his daughter, an only child. She had died suddenly, and the shock had killed him—his heart, you know—fatty degeneration, probably—all those rich Chinamen over-eat.

Again, some believed the story as it was told, and more did not. But Wu had died on the mainland, not on English soil, and it was no one’s business in Hong Kong.

John Bradley’s face grew very stern when he heard that Wu Li Chang had “become a guest on high,” and he went at once to Kowloon. And, almost to his surprise, Ah Sing admitted him. The mandarin would have commanded it so, Ah Sing thought.

Bradley learnt nothing on the mainland. He saw his dead friend, and prayed an English prayer beside him, kneeling down between him and a grinning, long, red-tongued Chinese god. That was all.

When he reached his own bungalow, he went into his tiny study, locked its door, and knelt again—at the prie-Dieu that stood against the wall between the little silver crucifix and an engraving of a tender, sorrowful face beneath a crown of thorns.

Between the elder Gregory’s relief at his son’s return and his exultation at Wu’s death, the younger Gregory came off nearly scot-free of paternal reprimand, and quite free of any real parental wrath.