at once."

He knew the port only as forlorn and insignificant. It did not matter.
One consolation remained: he would never see her again.



CHAPTER II


THE PIED PIPER

A gray smudge trailing northward showed where the Fa-Hien--Scottish
Oriental, sixteen hundred tons--was disappearing from the pale expanse
of ocean. The sampan drifted landward imperceptibly, seeming, with
nut-brown sail unstirred, to remain where the impatient steamer had met
it, dropped a solitary passenger overside, and cast him loose upon the
breadth of the antipodes. Rare and far, the sails of junks patched the
horizon with umber polygons. Rudolph, sitting among his boxes in the
sampan, viewed by turns this desolate void astern and the more desolate
sweep of coast ahead. His matting sail divided the shining bronze
outpour of an invisible river, divided a low brown shore beyond, and
above these, the strips of some higher desert country that shone like
snowdrifts, or like sifted ashes from which the hills rose black and
charred. Their savage, winter-blasted look, in the clear light of an
almost vernal morning, made the land seem fabulous. Yet here in reality,
thought Rudolph, as he floated toward that hoary kingdom,--here at last,
facing a lonely sea, reared the lifeless, inhospitable shore, the
sullen margin of China.