Before this visit it must be admitted, Rufus and Corinna Hallett, his parents according to the flesh, had been as remote and mythical to the mind of Peter Davenant as the Dragon’s Teeth to their progeny, the Spartans.  Merely in the most commonplace kind of data he was but poorly supplied concerning them.  He knew his father had once been a zealous young doctor in Graylands, Illinois, and had later become one of the pioneers of medical enterprise in the mission field; he knew, too, that he had already worked for some years at Hankow before he met and married Miss Corinna Meecham, formerly of Drayton, Georgia, but at that time a teacher in a Chinese school supported by one of the great American churches.  Events after that seemed to have followed rapidly.  Within a few years the babe who was to become Peter Davenant had seen the light, the mother had died, and the father had perished as the victim of a rising in the interior of Hupeh.  The child, being taken to America, and unclaimed by relatives, was brought up in the institution maintained for such cases by the Missionary Board of the church to which his father and mother had given their services.  He had lived there till, when he was seven years old, Tom and Sarah Davenant, childless and yet longing for a child, had adopted him.

These short and simple annals furnished all that Davenant knew of his own origin; but after the visit to Hankow the personality of his parents at least became more vivid.  He met old people who could vaguely recall them.  He saw entries in the hospital records made by his father’s hand.  He stood by his mother’s grave.  As for his father’s grave, if he had one, it was like that of Moses, on some lonely Nebo in Hupeh known to God alone.  In the compound Davenant saw the spot on which his father’s simple house had stood—­the house in which he himself was born—­though a wing of the modern hospital now covered it.  It was a relief to him to find that, except for the proximity of the lepers’ ward and the opium refuge, the place, with its trim lawns, its roses, its clematis, its azaleas, its wistaria, had the sweetness of an English rectory garden.  He liked to think that Corinna Meecham had been able to escape from her duties in the crowded, fetid, multi-colored city right outside the gates to something like peace and decency within these quiet walls.

He was not a born traveler; still less was he an explorer.  At the end of three days he was glad to take leave of his hosts at the hospital, and turn his launch down the river toward the civilization of Shanghai.  But it was on the very afternoon of his departure that the ideas came to him which ultimately took him back to Boston, and of which he was now thinking as he strolled through the silvery mist beside the Charles.