“I don’t see how any one human being can know as much as you do!” she exclaimed, with a look that Buddha might have envied.

“Even I make mistakes occasionally,” said Percival, modestly.  “Can’t always be right, you know.”

“But you are,” she persisted; “you are always abominably right, and I am always wrong.”

“Adorably wrong,” amended Percival, assisting with the tea-things.

“Two, three, four?” she asked, holding up the sugar-tongs.

“Doesn’t matter so long as I have you to look at.”

Now, when an Englishman ceases to be particular about the amount of sugar in his tea, you may know he is very far gone indeed.  By the time he had drained three cups of the jasmine-scented beverage and basked in the brilliance of Bobby’s smiles through the smoking of two cigars, he was feeling decidedly heady.

“If we are going to the races, we really must start,” declared Bobby when she found the situation getting difficult.

“What’s the use of going anywhere?” asked Percival, blowing one ring of smoke through another.

“Why, we are seeing the sights of Shanghai.  You said you were crazy about China.”

“So I am.  You are quite determined on the races?”

“Quite,” said Bobby.

Their way to the track lay along the famous Bubbling Well Road, and as they bowled along in a somewhat imposing victoria, with a couple of liveried Chinamen on the box, Bobby sat bolt upright, her cheeks flushed, and her eager eyes drinking in the sights.

It was a scene sufficiently gay to hold the interest of a much more sophisticated person than the untraveled young lady from Wyoming.  The whole of society, it appeared, was on route to the races.  The road was thronged with smart traps full of brilliantly dressed people of every nationality.  There were gay parties from the various legations, French, Russian, Japanese, German, English, American.  In and out among the whirling wheels of the foreigners poured the unending procession of native life, unperturbed, unconcerned.  A Chinese lady in black satin trousers and gorgeous embroidered coat, wearing a magnificent head-dress of jade and pearls, rode side by side with a coolie who trundled a wheelbarrow which carried his wife on one side and his week’s provisions on the other.  Water-carriers, street vendors, jinrikisha-runners, women with bound feet, children on foot, and children strapped on the backs of their mothers, crossed and recrossed, surged in and out.

But the Honorable Percival concerned himself little with these petty details.  To him China was only a pleasing background for Miss Roberta Boynton; he saw no further than her eager, smiling eyes, and heard nothing more distant than the ripple of her laughter.

At the races they found an absorbing bond of interest.  The love of horse-flesh was ingrained in both, and the merits of the various ponies provoked endless discussion.  Lights were beginning to twinkle on the bund when they drove back to the hotel.