Until her arrival in Singapore, she had never read a novel.  Pilgrim’s Progress, The Life of Martin Luther and Alice in Wonderland (the only fairy-story she had been permitted to read) were the sum total of her library.  But in the appendix of the dictionary she had discovered magic names—­Hugo, Dumas, Thackeray, Hawthorne, Lytton.  She had also discovered the names of Grimm and Andersen; but at that time she had not been able to visualize “the pale slender things with gossamer wings”—­fairies.  The world into which she was so boldly venturing was going to be wonderful, but never so wonderful as the world within these paper covers.  Already Cosette was her chosen friend.  Daily contact with actual human beings all the more inclined her toward the imaginative.

Joyous, she felt the need of physical expression; and her body began to sway sinuously, to glide and turn and twist about the room.  As she danced there was in her ears the faded echo of wooden tom-toms.

Eventually her movements carried her to the little stand at the side of the bed.  There lay upon this stand a book bound in limp black leather—­the Holy Bible.

Her glance, absorbing the gilt letters and their significance, communicated to her poised body a species of paralysis.  She stood without motion and without strength.  The books slid from her arms and fluttered to the floor.  Presently repellance grew under the frozen mask of astonishment and dissipated it.

“No!” she cried.  “No, no!”

With a gesture, fierce and intolerant, she seized the Bible and thrust it out of sight, into the drawer.  Then, her body still tense with the atoms of anger, she sat down upon the edge of the bed and rocked from side to side.  But shortly this movement ceased.  The recollection of the forlorn and loveless years—­stirred into consciousness by the unexpected confrontation—­bent her as the high wind bends the water-reed.

“My father!” she whispered.  “My own father!”

Queerly the room and its objects receded and vanished; and there intervened a series of mental pictures that so long as she lived would ever be recurring.  She saw the moonlit waters, the black shadow of the proa, the moon-fire that ran down the far edge of the bellying sail, the silent natives:  no sound except the slapping of the outrigger and the low sibilant murmur of water falling away from the sides—­and the beating of her heart.  The flight.

How she had fought her eagerness in the beginning, lest it reveal her ignorance of the marvels of mankind!  The terror and ecstasy of that night in Singapore—­the first city she had ever seen!  There was still the impression that something akin to a miracle had piloted her successfully from one ordeal to another.

The clerk at the Raffles Hotel had accorded her but scant interest.  She had, it was true, accepted doubtfully the pen he had offered.  She had not been sufficiently prompted in relation to the ways of caravansaries; but her mind had been alert and receptive.  Almost at once she had comprehended that she was expected to write down her name and address, which she did, in slanting cobwebby lettering, perhaps a trifle laboriously.  Ruth Enschede, Hartford, Conn.  The address was of course her destination, thousands of miles away, an infinitesimal spot in a terrifying space.