“To our better acquaintance,” said Rudolph, as they raised their glasses.

“What?  Oh, yes, thanks,” the other laughed.  “Any one would know you for a griffin here, Mr. Hackh.  You’ve not forgotten your manners yet.”

When they had sat down to dinner in another white-washed room, and had undertaken the promised rice and chicken, he laughed again, somewhat bitterly.

“Better acquaintance—­no fear!  You’ll be so well acquainted with us all that you’ll wish you never clapped eyes on us.”  He drained his whiskey and soda, signaled for more, and added:  “Were you ever cooped up, yachting, with a chap you detested?  That’s the feeling you come to have.—­Here, stand by.  You’re drinking nothing.”

Rudolph protested.  Politeness had so far conquered habit, that he felt uncommonly flushed, genial, and giddy.

“That,” urged Heywood, tapping the bottle, “that’s our only amusement.  You’ll see.  One good thing we can get is the liquor.  ’Nisi damnose bibimus,’—­forget how it runs:  ’Drink hearty, or you’ll die without getting your revenge,’”

“You are then a university’s-man?” cried Rudolph, with enthusiasm.

The other nodded gloomily.  On the instant his face had fallen as impassive as that of the Chinese boy who stood behind his chair, straight, rigid, like a waxen image of Gravity in a blue gown.—­“Yes, of sorts.  Young fool.  Scrapes.  Debt.  Out to Orient.  Same old story.  More debt.  Trust the firm to encourage that!  Debt and debt and debt.  Tied up safe.  Transfer.  Finish!  Never go Home.”—­He rose with a laugh and an impatient gesture.—­“Come on.  Might as well take in the club as to sit here talking rot.”

Outside the gate of the compound, coolies crouching round a lantern sprang upright and whipped a pair of sedan-chairs into position.  Heywood, his feet elevated comfortably over the poles, swung in the lead; Rudolph followed, bobbing in the springy rhythm of the long bamboos.  The lanterns danced before them down an open road, past a few blank walls and dark buildings, and soon halted before a whitened front, where light gleamed from the upper story.

“Mind the stairs,” called Heywood.  “Narrow and beastly dark.”

As they stumbled up the steep flight, Rudolph heard the click of billiard balls.  A pair of hanging lamps lighted the room into which he rose,—­a low, gloomy loft, devoid of comfort.  At the nearer table, a weazened little man bent eagerly over a pictorial paper; at the farther, chalking their cues, stood two players, one a sturdy Englishman with a gray moustache, the other a lithe, graceful person, whose blue coat, smart as an officer’s, and swarthy but handsome face made him at a glance the most striking figure in the room.  A little Chinese imp in white, who acted as marker, turned on the new-comers a face of preternatural cunning.

“Mr. Wutzler,” said Heywood.  The weazened reader rose in a nervous flutter, underwent his introduction to Rudolph with as much bashful agony as a school-girl, mumbled a few words in German, and instantly took refuge in his tattered Graphic.  The players, however, advanced in a more friendly fashion.  The Englishman, whose name Rudolph did not catch, shook his hand heartily.