only to take what escape was offered--golden visions, luxury, beauty
beyond all earth.

His contrary determination seemed of less actuality than the imagined
echoing of the splash that still hung in his brain. It was a thing far
away, belonging to another time, another man; like the memory of a period
of charming ignorance. The thought of it wove a strand of melancholy into
his present mature realization like the delicate scent of blossoming
trees borne to him on the evening air, barely perceptible and then lost
in the pungency of the opium. The latter became, mystically, all China,
the irresistible fascination that had gradually possessed his
imagination, dulling the associations of his heredity and birth, calling
him further and further into its secretive heart.

He returned to his room, where he put back the second ball in the tray of
its chest. An extraordinary weariness hung over him, there was a sense
of leaden weight in his arms and feet. Flashes of a different perception
pierced his apathy; a voice, seemingly outside his being, whispered of
danger, evil and danger.... A twisting leaf, he told himself again with
his deep fatalism.

The memory of Gerrit Ammidon's crisp blue gaze, his vigorous gestures and
speech, became an intolerable affront, representing the far lost point of
his own departure. His contrary feelings met and grappled in his mind;
but in the end the past, Salem, was always defeated, weaker, more faintly
perceived. In a great many essentials, he told himself, he had become
Chinese in sympathy and fiber.

The lamp threw a smooth gleam over the mango wood chest, and he bent,
turning the key in the ornamental brass lock. He could reconsider the