“Mind ye,” shouted Captain Kneebone, from the rail, “that don’t half exhaust the subjeck o’ lott’ries!  Why, luck”—­He shook both fists aloft, triumphantly, as if they had been full of money.  “Just ye wait.  I’ve a tip from Calcutta that—­Never mind.  Bar sells, when that fortch’n comes, my boy, the half’s yours!  Home we go, remember that!”

The sampan drew away.  Sweeping his arm violently, to threaten the coast of China and the whole range of his vision,—­

“You’re the one man,” he roared, “that makes all this mess—­worth a cowrie!”

Heywood laughed, waved his helmet, and when at last he turned, sat looking downward with a queer smile.

“Illusions!” he chuckled.  “What would a chap ever do without ’em?  Old Kneebone there:  his was always that—­a fortune in a lottery, and then Home!  Illusions!  And he’s no fool, either.  Good navigator.  Decent old beggar.”  He waved his helmet again, before stretching out to sleep.  “Do you know, I believe—­he would take me.”

The clinkered hills, quivering in the west, sank gradually into the heated blur above the plains.  As gradually, the two men sank into dreams.

Furious, metallic cries from the Pretty Lily woke them, in the blue twilight.  She had moored her sampan alongside a flight of stone steps, up which, vigorously, with a bamboo, she now prodded her husband.  He contended, snarling, but mounted; and when Heywood’s silver fell jingling into her palm, lighted his lantern and scuffed along, a churlish guide.  At the head of the slimy stairs, Heywood rattled a ponderous gate in a wall, and shouted.  Some one came running, shot bolts, and swung the door inward.  The lantern showed the tawny, grinning face of a servant, as they passed into a small garden, of dwarf orange trees pent in by a lofty, whitewashed wall.

“These grounds are yours, Hackh,” said Heywood.  “Your predecessor’s boy; and there”—­pointing to a lonely barrack that loomed white over the stunted grove—­“there’s your house.  You draw the largest in the station.  A Portuguese nunnery, it was, built years ago.  My boys are helping set it to rights; but if you don’t mind, I’d like you to stay on at my beastly hut until this—­this business takes a turn.  Plenty of time.”  He nodded at the fat little orange trees.  “We may live to take our chow under those yet, of an evening.  Also a drink.  Eh?”

The lantern skipped before them across the garden, through a penitential courtyard, and under a vaulted way to the main door and the road.  With Rudolph, the obscure garden and echoing house left a sense of magical ownership, sudden and fleeting, like riches in the Arabian Nights.  The road, leaving on the right a low hill, or convex field, that heaved against the lower stars, now led the wanderers down a lane of hovels, among dim squares of smoky lamplight.

Wu, their lantern-bearer, had turned back, and they had begun to pass a few quiet, expectant shops, when a screaming voice, ahead, outraged the evening stillness.