Page:Henry rideout--The siamese cat.djvu/19

. "Do come see something pleasant." And she led away her two elder companions.

That was all: but for months afterward, when hard work had crushed out the memory of his brief holiday in Japan; in odd moments, among the leprous goblin cities of the China Coast, among the million rat-hole lives of treaty ports, or in offices overlooking the saffron flood and slushy bund of a Shanghai winter, he remembered the incident, and in imagination saw the girl's clear and merry eyes. A trifle to recall; yet it was a vague comfort in some of those lonely, worried, weary moments which, among unholy sights, sounds, and stenches, come to a solitary white man lost in the flux and flow of the yellow myriads. Once, in Hong-Kong, half way through a letter to his uncle's firm, he looked up from the type-writer, stared across the