H

E stood there under the thatched eaves of a lowclass sake-shop and held out a hand as we passed. It was raining, not the casual downpour of America, or the "business-as-usual" sort of England, but in the sad Japanese fashion that brings mists thronging to temple-tops, like doubts and despairs to an appeaseless mind.

He was garbed in clothes as tattered as his beard: coat and trousers that hung loosely down, as if heavy with shame; shoes that had evidently not been bought by him; a hat serving for little except partly to conceal long-uncombed hair, on which the rain, trickling from the roof, dripped with disheartening certainty. Yet what was most striking about him was that he was indubitably and somehow distinguishedly American.

In the kuruma with me was Mrs. Neilson, the piquant widow of my former commandant, who was now living in Yokohama and who, I confess, was the chief attraction of my stop-over in Japan. We were making a train for Tokio, off for a reception at the embassy.

For either of us to have tossed the beggar a coin from under wraps and umbrellas would not have been easy; yet I supposed my companion, who uttered a quick, pained "Oh!" was merely too shocked or startled to do so. Nor did the pallor of her face, as the strawsandaled feet of our kurumayas

stopped at the station, suggest more to me. As for the disturbing bounder himself, I am sure his look had been only one of bleared, fatal, smiling misery.

My disgust at the mischance, nevertheless, led me to pause in the stationdoor and look back. That he was, or had been, one of our own kind doubly irritated me. Why could n't such degenerates keep their degradation out of the way of decent people with a day's freedom ashore? Should the prodigal only inherit the earth?

The truth is also that I particularly wanted Mrs. Neilson to be in her happiest mood. Her loveliness, aloof and uncompromising as it was, had intrigued me from time to time for several years, and I had quite made up my mind-well, mind-well, to mention matrimony. But this rotter, a disgrace to his sex, seemed to have stirred some memory of the masculine in her that was not likely to improve my chances. It was hugely provoking.

"See here," I said, catching up with her, "it's too bad-that beastly derelict, I mean."

"Yes," she answered, standing strangely motionless, her face turned away from me.

"An American begging, and of all places here in Yokohama !"

"Yes," she agreed again, but in a tone of such unmistakable bitterness and shame as gave me pause. For while passing a down-and-out is not pleasant, and while no one likes to have

"On the streets," she began, "begging! Oh, it 's horrible!"

"But, my dear lady, why so horrible? He's only a-"

"No; he 's more, more!" she cried, rising from her place and almost sobbing the words. Then she turned toward me, with hands pressed against her breast. "You'll have to forgive me," she said, as I waited for enlightenment, "but I can't go to Tokio."

There was stern distress, almost anger in her note, as well as disappointment.

"But tell me " I protested. "It's a shame," she broke out. "It is! it is! But something must be done. I must go back. Or perhaps you would -oh, would you?"

The change in her face was a revelation to me as she again sank to her seat. Her accustomed poise was wholly gone.

Her eyes, always a little hard, were haunted; her lips strained and drawn. The black aigret in her crimson hat was trembling. She had, it became manifest to me, known him somewhere, tragically, before. And now he had turned up, like an evil card in the deck of Fortune, and with that suddenness which makes the securest life seem to rest on quicksand.

The compartment-door was still open. Despite distaste for such mixups for such mixups and of provocation at the prospect

of my lost holiday and opportunity with her, I quietly closed it.

"Surely I'll go," I said through the open window. "An American can't let another stand begging at a Japanese pot-house without doing something."

I had put it objectively to ease the complexity; but she was a woman whose self-control, once shaken, is more easily broken by another's selfpossession than by calamity.

"Go, for God's sake!" she urged, quite undone. "I can't bear to think of him there. His name is Lowry. Go, and tell him-oh, get him away from here, out of Yokohama, anywhere,

or-"

The rest of her words did not reach me, for the train was drawing slowly out of the station. My last glimpse of her distorted face revealed it with a map of Japan framed, ironically, it seemed to me, above it.

WHEN I got back to the sake-shop the disheveled Lowry still stood there. But now his smile was sharp and mocking, for Charity had evidently passed by on the other side.

As I approached, he recognized me as a recent passer-by who had failed to give, and instinctively lowered his outstretched hand. It was, I could see, one thing to be tossed a casual coin and forgotten, but to be approached and spoken to by a fellow-countryman was quite another matter. Pride is sometimes stronger than honor or decency, or even than the unbearable thirst of dissipation.

"Will you come with me?" I said curtly enough.

"And where, my friend?" he answered, with a polite, disconcerting irony, which seemed to express contempt for any assumption of superiority on my part, as well as for existence in general.

"To get some clothes," I said, "and food; and, if you must, a drink."

Our eyes met squarely. In the exchange I could feel a vitiated soul trying to meet mine as an equal.

"And why this Christian charity?" he mocked, shrugging his rags, and shivering in the wet air of a somewhat chilly summer day.

"Well, mainly because I 'm a junkheaded fool," I replied, this time acridly.

He looked slowly at me-at the braid and epaulets of my rather smart uniform, then at his squalor. The contrast was not pleasant, but he smiled, perhaps with amusement at the thought of the humiliation it would cause me, evidently a person without humor, to walk the tourist-thronged streets with him. The smile, though sardonic, was unspeakably wretched.

"As you please," he assented, a touch of mockery still left, for self-respect, in his bow; and we turned into the street.

He walked beside me with shame and yet with contemptuous enjoyment. Our way was past the rich curio-shops, displaying shadowy treasures of bronze, silver, and ivory. It took all Mrs. Neilson's attractions, I 'm willing to admit, to keep me from turning him loose with yen in his pocket, or at best from handing him over somehow to the care of the consulate.

But, with clothes obtained, he was at length seated before a substantial lunch on the balcony of my room at the hotel. The rain had ceased. The bund, with its moist human stream, flowed below. In the harbor were the tethered ships of many nations, swarmed about by sampans, and from my destroyer floated the beloved stars and stripes.

He ate and drank in silence. I stood with my back to him, looking over the sea I had been glad to get away from a few hours since, but that I now heartily wished myself back on, out of this irritating pother.

It had to be got over, however; so I turned. He was just finishing his whisky and soda, and was doubtless considering the particular tone in which to thank me, when I spoke.

"I don't know who you are, where you came from, or what you are doing in Yokohama," I began, with an intensity that made him stare, "but I 've got to ask you to be good enough to tell me where you wish to go."

This was not entirely impressive or tactful, as he was quick to see. He scanned me coolly; then his lip curled.

"Have I informed you," he replied quietly, "that I desire to change my residence? I 'm obliged to you, no doubt," he shrugged deprecatingly toward the empty dishes,-"but as I have only lately arrived in this delightful city-delightful, that is, to you," he added, with secret hatred in his eyes, "I don't see just why you are so particularly interested in my departure."

"Nor do I," I answered harshly, realizing that I must speak plainer. "But there is a reason, and I 've no doubt it's a good one."

His stare became more guarded, but there was only such doubt in his face as comes easily to those who distrust destiny at large.

"This is most interesting," he said with more elaborate irony, yet at the same time clenching an uncontrolled hand. "I've no love for this city, mind you; no more than you, a seaman, would have for a rotten ship in a China typhoon. I came here first fifteen years ago. And then, my friend, I was a lad, happy, healthy, hopefulmy God!"

He paused at the vision his words had unintentionally raised before him -paused as if it were a ghost ready to strangle him. I knew I must say more to get the scene over.

"Well, you must clear out," I growled, "and the sooner the better. If you lack money, all right. That's all I 've got to say, except that one can't hang around making women miserable."

"Women?"

"The woman with me this morning when I passed you was Mrs. Hilda Neilson."

It took a moment before the name got through the blankness of his stare; then he quivered as if a harpoon had suddenly been hooked in his heart, and a flood of horror surged over his facesuch horror, it seemed, as might break into any terrible passion.

"Hilda-Neilson?" fell from him, like slow drops of blood. "HildaNeilson?"

I stared in turn. The inner cause of his horror and anguish was of course unknown to me, but of one thing I be

came aware: the thought that he had stood there in his degradation begging of her, and had been recognized, was an overwhelming poison.

"God! God! God!" he exclaimed, gazing at me with the expression of one who has been diabolically betrayed, and not for the first time, by chance. Then, as if on the verge of hysteria, or at least with an indignation that made him writhe, he cried: "It's a lie. She lives in San Francisco. She would n't come back here. She would n't. are you, anyway?"

Who

His debilitated body shook from head to foot.

"I don't think she believed you would come back," I said. It was getting hard to keep pity and kindness out of my voice, for back of his ruin, I began to feel, was some calamity greater than mere infirmity of individual will. Life had sometimes a way of destroying us with subtle and impersonal mischances more relentless than our own folly.

His passion, however, was now caught up and torn by another thought. "She sent you to me," he raged"sent you with money left her by Howard Neilson, whom she never loved, never, though she did marry him! She sent you to get me out of town-out of sight. Brushing her skirts against a memory that has become bloated is n't, doubtless, to her taste."

I did not deny this. At the moment it would have been useless. His loud sense of betrayal was deafening him to any other possible interpretation. He continued:

"You, my gallant friend, may know nothing of all this, you who no doubt want to marry her yourself. But you shall know it, endure it. I came here, as I told you, fifteen years ago-came to marry Hilda Holt. Yes, I. We had been engaged for a year, and had written each other two, three, four times a week. It was April, the month set for the wedding, when I sailed from San Francisco. I was young," his voice broke, and irony dropped away from it as he added: "The Golden Gate seemed to me the very gate of heaven as our ship put out through it."

He paused. Undeniable sobs were on the point of breaking from him.

"She met me out there in the harbor; came on a tug. As it danced up and down on the waves, it seemed to me she was dancing with joy at seeing me. And perhaps she was inwardly; perhaps not. God! I don't know now. She was flushed, anyhow, and happy and beautiful, fatally beautiful. And yet she was restrained; she was Hilda Holt.

"My things were taken to the hotel and handed to the porter, an ivoryfaced villain who-but, no; wait till you have heard, to judge him. Then we went to Hilda's home to see her people.

"The streets seemed enchanted, for I'd never been out of America before, and our kuruma was double; so I sat close to her, as you did this morning. To live in this place, as I expected to, and to work for her among these little people, who seemed so pleasant and kindly-it suffocates me with despair as I recall it.

"Her people received me open-armed, as was right. They jested at my infatuation and about the wedding. Meanwhile we went out through the streets of little shops, whose blue-andwhite hangings, with Japanese characters on them, seemed to me like goodluck signs. Good luck? They are writhing serpents of hell to me now."

He reached for his empty whiskyglass and drained the few drops that had gathered at the bottom. The mere habit seemed to steady him.

"The third day Hilda was occupied with clothes. I was left alone at the hotel, with nothing to do. The charm of the land had already intoxicated me. It can, with almost any man. It soothes the senses, yet lures them. And the curst place does so with such quaintness and witchery of beautiful sights and sounds that he never thinks of evil or danger.

"An idea struck me that I would buy something for Hilda-something wonderful and unique; something that even the connoisseurs would gape at; something, too, for our home, which was to be built in Japanese fashion. For we intended to be real Orientals, Hilda and I did, with mats, shoji, kakemono, and all.

"I told the porter at the door that