Page:The Specimen Case.djvu/36

Rh than an arrow's flight away so gross a commerce as the baked extremities of pigs attracts a clamorous throng?"

"The explanation is twofold, gracious being," answered Ming, resolving for the future to abstain from the food she thus disparaged, though it was, indeed, his favourite dish. "In the first place it is as the destinies ordain; in the second it is still too early after daybreak for the elderly and weak to venture forth."

"Yet why should only the venerable and decrepit seek uprightness?" demanded the maiden, with a sympathetic gesture of reproach towards so illiberal an outlook. "Cannot the immature and stalwart equally aspire?"

"Your words are ropes of truth," assented Ming admiringly, "but none the less has it appropriately been written, 'At seventeen one may defy demons; at seventy he trembles merely at the smell of burning sulphur.' Doubtless, then, it is your humane purpose?" and partly from a wish to detain so incomparable a vision, and also because there was no reason why the encounter should not at the same time assume a remunerative bend, he directed her unfathomable eyes towards that detail of the scroll where the very moderate rates at which merit could be acquired were prominently displayed.

"Alas," exclaimed Hya no less resourcefully, "she who bears the purse is by now a distance to the west. Haply some other time"

"Perchance your venerated father or revered grandsire might be rejoiced to grasp the opportunity" he urged, but in the meanwhile the maiden had passed beyond his voice along the Way.

Ming would have remained in a high-minded contemplation, somewhat repaid to see, if not her distant outline, at least the direction in which she would progress, but almost at once the oleose Lieu was at his elbow.

"If," remarked that earthly-souled person with a cun-