“For those few minutes,” he confessed, “I was very angry.  It brings great pain to a man to see the thing he loves droop her wings, flutter down to earth, and walk the common highway.  It is not for you, dear one, to mingle with that crowd who scheme and cheat, hide and deceive, for any reward in the world, whether it be money, fame, or the love of country.  You were not made for those things, and when I saw you there, so utterly in my power, having deliberately taken your risk, I was angry.  For a single moment I meant that you should realise the danger of the path you were treading.  I think that I did make you realise it.”

Her eyes fell.  He seemed to have established some compelling power over her.  He had met her thoughts before they were uttered, and answered even her unspoken question.

“I wish you didn’t make life so much like a kindergarten,” she complained, with an almost pathetic smile at the corners of her lips.

“It is a very different place,” he rejoined fervently, “that I desire to make of life for you.  Listen, please.  I have spoken to you first the formal words which make all things possible between us, and now, if I may, I let my heart speak.  Somewhere not far from Pekin I have a palace, where my lands slope to the river.  For five months in the year my gardens are starred with blue and yellow flowers, sweet-smelling as the almond blossom, and there are little pagodas which look down on the blue water, pagodas hung with creepers, not like your English evergreens, but with blossoms, pink and waxen, which open as one looks at them and send out sweet perfumes.  When you are there with me, dear one, then I shall speak to you in the language of my ancestors, which some day you will understand, and you shall know that love has its cradle in the East, you shall feel the flame of its birth, the furnace of its accomplishment.  Here my tongue moves slowly, yet I stoop my knee to you, I show you my heart, and my lips tell you that I love.  What that love is you shall learn some day, if you have the will and the confidence and the soul.  Will you come back to China with me, Maggie?”

She rested her fingers on his hand.

“You are a magician,” she confessed.  “I am very English, and yet I want to go.”

He stood for a moment looking into her eyes.  Then he stooped down and raised her hesitating fingers to his lips.

“I believe that you will come,” he said simply.  “I believe that you will ride over the clouds with me, back to the country of beautiful places.  So now I speak to you of serious things.  Of money there shall be what you wish, more than any woman even of your rank possesses in this country.  I shall give you, too, the sister of my great Black Dragon so that in five days, if you wish, you can pass from any of my palaces to London.  And further than that, behold!”

He drew from his pocket a roll of papers.  Maggie recognised it, and her heart beat faster.  Curiously enough, just then she scarcely thought of its world importance.  She remembered only those few moments of strange thrills, the wonder at finding him in that room, as he stood watching her, the horror and yet the thrill of his measured words.  He laid the papers upon the table.