“We found all his pockets empty.”

“Then they were empty when he left,” replied Ah Cum, with dignity.

“I was only commenting.  Did he act to you that day as if he knew what he was doing?”

“Not all of the time.”

“A queer case;” and the doctor passed on.

Ah Cum made a movement as though to follow, but reconsidered.  The word of a Chinaman; he had given it, so he must abide.  There was now no honest way of warning Taber that the net had been drawn.  Of course, it was ridiculous, this inclination to assist the fugitive, based as it was upon an intangible university idea.  And yet, mulling it over, he began to understand why the white man was so powerful in the world:  he was taught loyalty and fair play in his schools, and he carried this spirit the world which his forebears had conquered.

Suddenly Ah Cum laughed aloud.  He, a Chinaman, troubling himself over Occidental ideas!  With his hands in his sleeves, he proceeded on his way.

* * * * *

Ruth and the doctor returned to the hotel at four.  Both carried packages of books and magazines.  There was an air of repressed gaiety in her actions:  the sense of freedom had returned; her heart was empty again.  The burden of decision had been transferred.

And because he knew it was a burden, there was no gaiety upon the doctor’s face; neither was there speech on his tongue.  He knew not how to act, urged as he was in two directions.  It would be useless to tell her to go back, even heartless; and yet he could not advise her to go on, blindly, not knowing whether her aunt was dead or alive.  He was also aware that all his arguments would shatter themselves against her resolutions.  There was a strange quality of steel in this pretty creature.  He understood now that it was a part of her inheritance.  The father would be all steel.  One point in her narrative stood out beyond all others.  To an unthinking mind the episode would be ordinary, trivial; but to the doctor, who had had plenty of time to think during his sojourn in China, it was basic of the child’s unhappiness.  A dozen words, and he saw Enschede as clearly as though he stood hard by in the flesh.

To preach a fine sermon every Sunday so that he would lose neither the art nor the impulse; and this child, in secret rebellion, taking it down in long hand during odd hours in the week!  Preaching grandiloquently before a few score natives who understood little beyond the gestures, for the single purpose of warding off disintegration!  It reminded the doctor of a stubborn retreat; from barricade to barricade, grimly fighting to keep the enemy at bay, that insidious enemy of the white man in the South Seas—­inertia.

The drunken beachcombers; the one-sided education; the utter loneliness of a white child without playfellows, human or animal, without fairy stories, who for days was left alone while the father visited neighbouring islands, these pictures sank far below their actual importance.  He would always see the picture of the huge, raw-boned Dutchman, haranguing and thundering the word of God into the dull ears of South Sea Islanders, who, an hour later, would be carrying fruit penitently to their wooden images.