Four evenings later under the snapping stars of the midsummer heaven Margaret Wellington and Jack Russell sat side by side in two camp chairs on the bridge of the _Dirigo_. The gunboat was sweeping round the great curve of the Yang-tse above Hankow and to starboard the pagodas of Wu-chang rose dimly through the lights of the city. Below in the hot cabin sat the Rev. Theophilus and his wife reading "The Spirit of Missions."
"And now," said the boy, as he drew her hand through his, "you are going to be happy forever and always. The world is full of wonderful things and nice, kind people who are trying to do good and yet have a jolly time while they are doing it. And you will have the dearest mother a girl ever had. How proud she'll be of you! Now promise to forgive me; you know why I did it! Do you suppose I'd have dared to do it if I hadn't?"
"Yes," she answered happily, "I knew why you did it and I forgive you, only, of course, it really was very wicked. But----"
The sentence was never finished--to the delight of the government pilot behind them.
"What do you think my uncle will say when we tell him?" she laughed.
"He'll say, 'Bless me! Dear me! I don't know!'" answered the boy, and they both giggled hysterically.
Abaft the black shadow of the smokestack Yen and the Shan-si man stood in silence watching the two on the bridge. The Shan-si man raised his arm once more in the direction of Wu-chang and made a joke.
"Above is Heaven's Hall!" said he. "Below are--the two most foolish things in all the world--a boy and a girl!"
"There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture." --_Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying."_
It was five o'clock, Sunday afternoon, and the slanting sunbeams had crawled across the bed and up the walls and vanished somehow into the ceiling when Voltaire McCartney came to himself, kicked off the patchwork quilt, elevated his torso upon one elbow and took an observation out of the dingy window. The prospect of the Palisades to the northwest was undimmed, for the wind was blowing fresh from the sea and the smoke from the glucose factory on the Jersey side was making straight up the river in a long, black horizontal bar, behind which the horizon glowed in a brilliant, translucent mass of cloud. McCartney swung his thin legs clear of the bed and fumbled with his left hand in the pocket of a plaid waistcoat dangling from the iron post. The act was unconscious, equivalent to the automatic groping for one's slippers which perchance the reader's own well-regulated feet perform on similar occasions. The pocket in question yielded a square of white tissue, which the fingers deftly folded, transferred to the other hand, and then filled with tobacco. Like others nourished upon stimulants and narcotics, McCartney awoke _absolutely_, without a trace of drowsiness, nervously ready to do the next thing, whatever that might chance to be. His first act was to pull on his shoes, the second to slip his suspenders over his rather narrow shoulders, and the third to light the cigarette. Then he sauntered across the room to the window sill, upon which slept profoundly a small tortoise-shell cat, and picked up a pocket volume, well worn, which he shook open at a point designated by a safety match. For several moments he devoured the page with his eyes, his hollow face filled with peculiar exaltation. Then he expelled a cloud of smoke sucked from the glowing end of his cigarette, tossed away the butt, and thrust the book into his hip pocket.