“Jolivet’s kids wake you?” Heywood, in a blue kimono, nodded from the doorway.  “Public nuisance, that school.  Quite needless, too.  Some bally French theory, you know, sphere of influence, and that rot.  Game played out up here, long ago, but they keep hanging on.—­Bath’s ready, when you like.”  He broke out laughing.  “Did you climb into the water-jar, yesterday, before dinner?  Boy reports it upset.  You’ll find the dipper more handy.—­How did you ever manage?  One leg at a time?”

Echoes of glee followed his disappearance.  Rudolph, blushing, prepared to descend into the gloomy vault of ablution.  Charcoal fumes, however, and the glow of a brazier on the dark floor below, not only revived all his old terror, but at the stair-head halted him with a new.

“Is the water safe?” he called.

Heywood answered impatiently from his bedroom.

“Nothing safe in this world, Mr. Hackh.  User’s risk.”  An inaudible mutter ended with, “Keep clean, anyway.”

At breakfast, though the acrid smoke was an enveloping reminder, he made the only reference to their situation.

“Rain at last:  too late, though, to flush out the gutters.  We needed it a month ago.—­I say, Hackh, if you don’t mind, you might as well cheer up.  From now on, it’s pure heads and tails.  We’re all under fire together.”  Glancing out of window at the murky sky, he added thoughtfully, “One excellent side to living without hope, maskee fashion:  one isn’t specially afraid.  I’ll take you to your office, and you can make a start.  Nothing else to do, is there?”

Dripping bearers and shrouded chairs received them on the lower floor, carried them out into a chill rain that drummed overhead and splashed along the compound path in silver points.  The sunken flags in the road formed a narrow aqueduct that wavered down a lane of mire.  A few grotesque wretches, thatched about with bamboo matting, like bottles, or like rosebushes in winter, trotted past shouldering twin baskets.  The smell of joss-sticks, fish, and sour betel, the subtle sweetness of opium, grew constantly stronger, blended with exhalations of ancient refuse, and (as the chairs jogged past the club, past filthy groups huddling about the well in a marketplace, and onward into the black yawn of the city gate) assailed the throat like a bad and lasting taste.  Now, in the dusky street, pent narrowly by wet stone walls, night seemed to fall, while fresh waves of pungent odor overwhelmed and steeped the senses.  Rudolph’s chair jostled through hundreds and hundreds of Chinese, all alike in the darkness, who shuffled along before with switching queues, or flattened against the wall to stare, almost nose to nose, at the passing foreigner.  With chairpoles backing into one shop or running ahead into another, with raucous cries from the coolies, he swung round countless corners, bewildered in a dark, leprous, nightmare bazaar.  Overhead, a slit of cloudy sky showed rarely; for the most part,