There was another slight Manila experience, which took place after the first parting with David Cairns, the latter being called to China by rumors of uprising.  Pack-train Thirteen had rubbed itself out in service—­was just a name.  Bedient was delighting in the thought of hunting up Cairns in China....  It was dusk again, that redolent hour.  Bedient had just dined.  So sensitive were his veins—­that coffee roused him as brandy might another.  His health was brought to such perfection, that its very processes were a subtle joy, which sharpened the mind and senses.  Bedient had been so long in the field, that the sight of even a Filipino woman was novel.  Strange, forbidding woman of the river-banks—­yet in the twilight, and with the inspired eyes of young manhood, that dusk-softened line from the lobe of the ear to the point of the shoulder—­a passing maid with a tray of fruit upon her head—­was enough to startle him with the richness of romance.  It was not desire—­but the great rousing abstraction, Woman, which descends upon full-powered young men at certain times with the power of a psychic visitation.  His heart poured out in a greeting that girdled the world, to find the Woman—­somewhere.

Bedient did not know at this time of the heart emptiness of the world’s women—­a longing so vast, so general, that interstellar space is needed to hold it all.  Still, he had so much to give, it seemed that in the creative scheme of things there must be a woman to receive and ignite all these potentials of love....  In this mood his mind reverted to that isle of the sea—­the woman, and the room that was her house....  He was sitting in the plaza before the Hotel d’Oriente. A little bamboo-table was before him and a long glass of claret and fruit-juice.  The night was still; hanging-lanterns were lit, though the darkness was not yet complete.  There was a mingling of mysterious lights and shadows among the palm-foliage that challenged the imagination—­like an unfinished picture....  Only a few of the tables were occupied.  The native servants were very quiet.  Bedient heard a girlish voice out of the precious and perilous South.

...  It was not Adelaide.  He had only started to turn, when his consciousness told him that.  But the voice was much like hers—­the same low and lazy loveliness in the formation of certain words.  The appeal was swift.  Bedient did not turn, though he sat tingling and attentive....  At this time not a few of the American officers had been joined by their wives in Manila, and most of these were quartered at the Oriente....  He knew the man’s voice, too, but in such a different way—­the voice of a soldier heard afield.

What was said had little or no significance—­a man’s tolerant, sometimes laughing monosyllables; and silly, cuddling, unquotable nothings from his companion.  It was the ardor in her tones—­the sort of completion of sensuous happiness—­and the strange kinship between her and the woman he had known—­these, that brought to Bedient a sudden madness of hunger to hear such words for his own....