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 vermilion of its surface or the gold leaf of the arabesque that decorated it.

The old man laid one thin claw-hand on the casket, the bleached and taloned other on the young shoulder. "I hope that you will be here to stretch and straighten me in it at my ease when my repose comes, and I take my jade-like sleep in this matchless Longevity Wood. If so, or if not, remember always that you are Wu, my grandson, a master of men, the son and the father of good women, and a Chinese. You have always pleased me well. Now go."

The boy prostrated himself and laid his forehead on the old man's foot. The old man bent and blessed him. The child rose.

"Go!"

Without a word, without a look, Wu Li Chang went. And James Muir, waiting at the outer door, noticed that not once did the child look back—not when they came round the devil-protection screen, not when they passed the ancestral graves, not when they went beneath his great-grandmother's memorial arch, not when they crested the hill—nowhere, not at all, not once. He folded his hands together in his long sleeves and went calmly, with his head held high and with a sick smile on his pale face. They were to sail from Hong Kong in a few days, but that was a small thing: this was his passing from China and from childhood.

And as they passed south, bearing east, the boy said little. He neither sulked nor grieved—or, if he grieved, he hid it well. But he wrapped himself in reticence as in a thick cloak.

His eyes went everywhere, but his face was expressionless and his lips motionless.

Villages, cities, gorges, lakes, hills, highways and by