By D. R. C.

THAT two people, a man and a woman; separated by oceans, continents, race, color, traditions, manners, customs, yet fulfilling the law of affinity, should be drawn together to love, live, joy and sorrow through many years, is a thing that makes for thought - and humility - humility before that great Power that we even have no name for, or rather that we have many for - all different.

As the steamer dropped anchor in the harbor at Hongkong, Helen Arkwright stood on deck watching the scene. As she saw the multitude of sampans, the Company's tug, the Customs boat, the Bund, with its myriads of human flies, the terrace after terrace rising above the city, with the pretty embowered villas, the serpentine roads of which she caught occasional glimpses as the turn came opposite the harbor, the rocked and bulwarked roads higher up, the long ribbon of road, with its climbing cars, going towards the mist-crowned Peak, she sighed in sheer contentment of spirit. It was all so familiar, even the smell--- that never to be forgotten odour of swarming humanity, strange food-stuffs, fish, sea-water and opium that assails the nostrils of the voyager at every Oriental port and which elicits either expressions of disgust or of content, according as the person has inherited the Occidental or Oriental habit of thought.

Later, after she had landed at the quay, and had walked across the road to the Victoria Hotel, to be shown into a great bare cool room, with its colonnaded and latticed veranda looking seaward, she leaned over the railing and looked down on the motley crowd below, still with that feeling of utter content, of having returned to her own after a long and distressing voyage.

Yet this was the first time that the New England girl had ever been further away from home than school and college. She remembered how, as she was carelessly glancing over the list of "wants" in a paper one day, out of many others her eyes had jumped to it, and her whole being had responded to a call. What call, for what purpose, she did not know; only that it was imperative, soul and spirit absorbing, strengthening and determining, until the many obstacles of family disapproval - almost refusal - severing of ties of all kinds, lack of even any but the meagrest knowledge of her destination or the people she was to go to.

Everything fell away before this wonderful something which she felt but could give no account of.

And now, after a long trip, a glimpse of Yokohama, Kobe, Nagasaki, Shanghai, she was in Hongkong, and soon to see the people to whom she had come from so far. She idly speculated as to their appearance. She knew that there was a father, mother, and two girls, aged 10 and 12 respectively, and that she had, for some inexplicable reason, sacrificed a career for which she had fitted herself through long years of work to take, forsooth, the position of governess to two unknown girls of an uninteresting age and possible - probable - stupidity. She, Helen Arkwright, the cleverest girl in her class, for whom all things were foretold - even hints of a college presidency later on - had seen everything, even her ambitions, melt away like mist before this all compelling something that called. She vaguely knew, with all her cool, critical, analysis of conditions, that she was using the governess proposition as an excuse - as much to herself as to those most unsatisfied and worthy, dear folk at home, and she gave the square shoulders a shrug as she turned away to go to her unpacking.

Her eyes once more fell upon the crowd.below as she turned, and she started, flushed, and then drew back into the shadow of one of the pillars of the verandah. For her eyes had met the eyes of a tall and stately man below on the Bund, and in the look of recognition, to which she felt her own responding, she had but a confused idea of his costume until - still looking as though held - she realised that the man was dressed in the clothes of a Chinese gentleman, and that only the fine intellectual face and beautiful silken garments distinguished him from the crowd around. Almost fainting with the emotion which had swept over her like a surging flood, she held fast to the pillar for support. Resentful as she was with all the Occidental intolerance for a race of a different color, costume, manner, religion, still she felt that she was but a mote in the shaft of light cast from that other realm, and as helpless as it. Sinking down upon the floor she lay, spent and numb from the tearing, turning, rending consciousness that here and now was the explanation of the call and her obeying.

TWO people were climbing up a long, winding street, part stone steps part road, past interminable high walls.of stucco, painted salmon pink, nile green and pale turuoise blue, with overhanging flowering trees and vines, and occasional doors, carved in lacework pattern, showing glimpses of cool stone and tiled courtyards and vistas through half-open doors of further courts beyond. At last, reaching the summit of the hill and skirting a great wall, softly yellow, under a perfect veiling of creepers, bourganvillia, passion-flower and jasmin they stopped before a carved and iron-studded gate. One, a Chinese of the house-servant class, knocked, and, as the door opened, drew aside for the other to pass in before him. The other .was a man of 35, large of frame, angular, strongly and sternly featured, dressed in the garb of a Protestant clergyman. He walked under the carved arch of a further doorway into a large, rectangular courtyard, and even in his mental condition of perturbation he could not but notice the beauty and luxury of it. The great basin with aquatic plants, the tiled pavements, carved benches, wonderful flowering shrubs in receptacles even more wonderful, the masses of color and materials unfamiliar to him, answered to a hunger in his nature that had been rigidly suppressed all of his God-fearing life.

As he entered a large, semi-darkened room, with glints of gold and crimson in its hangings a woman, came swiftly towards him dressed in the Chinese dress of a wealthy woman with her brown hair simply twisted about her head and the light of expectation, almost fear, in her brown eyes.

"Brother Will, you do not know me," she said, holding out both her hands with a grace of gesture, part welcome, part supplication. He took them, and, looking into the face that he had not seen for 15 years, felt all the anger, antagonism and shame die out of his heart before the perfect joy and peace of that placid face. He could only hold her tight and murmer, "Dear old Nell! Dear old Nell!"

For a moment they stood thus clasped, this brother and sister who had never seen or heard from each other since she stepped on to the train which was to carry her to the steamer leaving San Francisco for China, he then in his last college year, she just having finished hers. And now they met, when the years had done their work, either for good or ill, irrevocably.

With a little laugh, a bit tremulous, she drew him into the room beyond and pushed him into a chair.

"You great, big, dear thing," she said. "I cannot tell you how good it is to see you. And you're bigger and leaner and uglier and dearer than ever," and she heartily kissed him again.

Seeing that he was struggling with an emotion that, man-like, he could not find relief in words, she seated herself in a chair close to him and in a voice a bit uncertain still, gave him the outline of her story. He listened to her story as he had listened when a boy, to The Thousand and One Nights, and finally, when ended he could hardly bring himself back to conditions and actualities as he knew them.

"But Nell, old girl," he commenced--- Yes, yes, Billy dear," she said, "I know all that you want to say, or rather that you did want to say but now only feel possibly you ought to. But don't do it! Don't!"

She looked so earnest and so happy that he had not the heart, but allowed himself to be petted and scolded and made much of by Nell and Nell's children, round, happy youngsters, with the combined beauty and fineness of father and mother, and even forgot they all wore, even his Nell, the Chinese dress and lived in the Chinese way - an idealised Chinese way. As to the children, Nell explained that they had been taught as we were, only more so, for added to their Occidental studies has been the best of the Oriental, which, and here she looked mischievous - is rich in good things.

The day flew as they talked of people and events, and at 10 o'clock he was shown into his room. Before settling to the letter that he had to write he stepped out on to the balcony and saw the water and the long, horse-shoe Bund that Macao is famous for, with its twinkling lights and glimpses of heights to the left. The utter peacefulness and beauty of the scene stole over him, and in a realisation of the great power that had moulded the fate and the life of the little sister, so beneficently giving her heart's desire - great and enduring love and tenderness, comradeship, and understanding, even though in a way foreign to his way - there was no memory of the fact that the sister's husband was not as he or his.

After a while he went inside and wrote the letter that was the story of his sister's life as she had told it to him that day. This was what he wrote:

My Dear People,-- You have by this time received the various letters I have sent you, and are not now wanting anything of travel or scenery, only the story of Nell's life. First let me tell you that she is happy - so much more so than any other woman I know that it radiates from her in a beautiful cheerfulness and almost merriness, and I know in some way that is not merely born of her telling, that she would not exchange her love and her life for any other and that never has even a shadow of regret marred its perfection. You know in what spirit I came here and in what spirit I left you all, and I am ashamed of mine and yours before this thing I now know.

She says that if you wish it she will write to you and tell all of the details of these years, but only on condition that no criticism of him shall ever come from you to her. So it will depend upon yourselves whether this dear woman shall be once more one of us.

After she saw him that day of landing from the hotel balcony, and felt the recognition between their two souls, she says that she was hardly conscious how she got through the next two days. She vaguely remembers seeing the mother and father of the two girls whom she had come to teach, of answering their questions, apparently with satisfaction to them, of listening to the directions they gave her as to the trip the following day to Canton, where they lived, which she had to make alone, as they were remaining in Hongkong over the week for some functions at Government House; of eating, riding in chairs to see the various sights, of, in fact, living the usual life of even getting on the boat for Canton, all according to the directions given her and always with the perfect knowledge that she was not going to Canton but to some other place and that, too, with the man whose eyes had held hers those seconds of recognition. She recognised only in a most impersonal way what the world would think of the enormity of it, if it knew; that it meant a severing of every tie of family, of caste, of condition, of country; all this was of absolutely no moment to her. She only knew of an ever growing longing, a longing for a sight of him, a desire to touch him, to hear him speak, and when; in the span of confusion of the half-hour before the Canton boat left, he came to her and said, " Will you come to me, dear heart," she went trustfully, happily without a qualm of conscience or a single thought of anything but his presence.

They left the ship, took a sampan, and were rowed to a native boat, which immediately weighed anchor. The next day they landed at the place which has since been her home.

I find that when it comes to telling you of her first talk with him, when the realisation of what she had done swept over her, and the haze that had enveloped her mentality for those past days was lifted, that I must give it to you as I remember her giving it to me.

"When I came to a realisation of what I had done," she said, "and saw that I was in the cabin of a most strange boat, with quaint hangings of soft, rich coloring, and that there was standing in front of me the man, I felt the sudden hot tears well up. Seeing them, he dropped on his knees beside me and, taking me in his arms, told me that long years ago, his old nurse, who had taken his pretty, dead mother's place in his life, had told him, 'Some day you will marry one of your father's people - a white woman; she will come over the seas to you, not by any volition of hers or yours but of that power. Keep yourself clean of heart and soul for her; make yourself worthy of her in every way, so that you may enter into the joy of life with her.' He had always believed the tale, and with that mysticism which we - we of the little understanding - of the Occident call superstition had believed and had waited and while waiting had tried to be worthy. He told her that as he grew up he was sent to England to school and then to college, and that at his father's death he found himself an immensely wealthy man. He had travelled and studied men and countries and had almost forgotten that his mother had been a pretty singing girl on a Canton river boat when his father, a wealthy European trader, had taken her away to Hongkong, and that he had been born in the back room of a third floor, in a house where his pretty mother was. only one of several girls similarly kept by various European merchants.

"He had played those first years on a balcony overlooking a steep street just off Queen's Road, kept well and happy by the old nurse whom his German father had hired to care for him when the pretty songbird, his mother, had spread her wings and flown away to another world than that of the four rooms that her lover had gilded for her as a cage so few mouths before. Poor, pretty, song bird, never to have known freedom, passing from a keeper's hands into a lover's, --- just a cage of cages.

"He also told me of the never to be forgotten day when, as a lad of eight, freshly bathed, his pig-tail newly strung with silk threads, attired in his best and newest brocaded silk trousers and coat, with old Quan Sen, his nurse, also in her best - for the foreign father was generous to the little son when he remembered to be - they had climbed the long sunlit roads, under the tree-ferns and past the pretty villas, until they came to a gate through which they went, and after going still up stood upon the veranda of a house. Through the long windows he saw many men sitting around a long table eating and drinking and laughing. They looked up in surprise from the old woman bowing low to the handsome lad in his silken finery.with his arms filled with tuberose and narcissus, which they had stopped to buy as they passed the flower-sellers in front of the German Club, just off the Queen's Road.

"The old nurse, always bowing, explained in 'pidgin English' that she had brought his son to wish his Excellency many more birthdays, and the boy, looking eagerly around the table and seeing the face, not too familiar, of his father, went forward and, putting the flowers into his hands, made a little speech in German, which the sometimes sober lover of one of the women in the house had taught him. He thanked him for his kindness, wished him joy of the day, and finishing with the pretty German love-message the children to their parents, bowed again and went back to the side of his old nurse, who waited humbly, trembling in anticipation of the father's favour or disapproval and in the uttermost pride in her charge.

"The lunch had been a success, the drinks to their host many, and the atmosphere charged with kindness. So that when, after the speech of the boy, the father wiped his wicked old sentimental German eyes, with one accord they, then and there decided that the boy must be publicly recognised, sent to Europe to school, and given a chance. All this was done, and for years almost all memory of those early times was drowned under the flood of new experiences, until one day in Washington, as he sauntered along ------ Street, not distinguished from the rest of the people except by a greater height and more erect carriage, and dressed in the regulation calling costume of English gentleman, he happened to pass the Chinese Legation as the Minister and members of his suite were coming out. In one overwhelming tide his heart was flooded with a longing and a hunger unspeakable, and this seemingly English gentleman stood aside, holding himself in check lest he should say or do anything to outrage convention. Over his memory flashed picture after picture of those early years, and the difficult Chinese tongue, rich in axioms, as he had heard it so often from his old nurse, sprang to his lips. Finally, when the carriages containing the members of the Legation had driven off, he turned and went back to his hotel, forgetting the call he had intended making on the pretty daughter of Senator B whom he had met on the Campagnia last trip. At the hotel he startled his man by ordering everything to be packed and made ready, for the 9.10 train the following day, one step on the road to China.

"A month after they arrived at Hongkong by the Coptic an Englishman who, leaving everything at the hotel, hurried away into the city and spent the rest of the day going up and down one street after the other. Little had changed - at least in the old part. There were new villas on the hills, and Bowen Road was an accomplished fact and a beautiful one. There were many changes in the quarter given up to Europeans, but the city was the same, and he had no difficulty in finding his old home, and, remembering that the old nurse had had a tiny room on the roof, he climbed the many flights just to once more see the city as he used to see it in those days of long ago.

"As he swept out upon the sunlit roof upon which the door of the hallway opened he saw old Quan Sen, looking little older in spite off the 20 years that had passed, industriously making patchwork, as of old, whilst a battered copper pot rocked on the handful of lighted charcoal in the brazier and the penetrating odor of the cooking filled his nostrils.

"To his greeting, 'The gods to bend to you this day, sister,' in the Chinese of his childhood, she lifted a startled glance, and as he added, 'I am hungry, Quanie. Give, give quickly!' she pushed up the huge, horn-rimmed spectacles. He smiled, and she threw up her old hands and bent her old gray head in happiest bowing, laughing and crying and calling him 'Her baby, her boy, her soul's light,' all the old familiar titles, whilst she wept on his shoes and then diligently polished them with the piece of patchwork she had been sewing.

"He had much ado to calm her. Old nerves are like old harp-strings and need careful handling. Finally when she was restored to something like her normal self he told her of all of the years of almost forgetfulness and then the sudden sweeping tide of memory - all in the fluent Chinese of his boyhood, barely halting for an occasional expression. He told her that he wanted his birthright, that Europeanism was not for him, and asked her how it was best to go about it, that it might all be done quietly with no comment. She nodding her wise old head, agreed. 'He had been given his chance' - the chance of his father's blood, and now, at twenty-nine, he was come into his own and his own had naught to do with the ways of the Occident.

"It was rumoured in the quarter that Quan Sen had, in her early youth, given herself, for love of his fair face and merry ways, to a Dane, young and enthusiastic, and that the pretty 'Song-bird' from the Canton River boat was the fruit of that love, so that this strong, handsome man was by rights, her grandson. Certain it was that the light of love and pride was great in her old eyes - far too great for aught but nature to light.

"Obstacles were put aside, with the help of a mighty Chinese personage who was overjoyed at the getting back of one of their own, and a beautiful home was built on the highest hilltop overlooking the harbour at Macao. He became Quang Sen Tan, wealthy merchant, banker and philanthropist. But when they begged him to marry, he pleaded for time, always with the knowledge that his 'flower woman' was coming to him from over the sea.

"He waited, and the years fled until he was a man of thirty-five. His old nurse had passed on and he was beginning to feel the loneliness of his life and its isolation, when a dream came to him. He dreamed that his old nurse came to him and said, '---She is ready for you; she will come to you. Call her!' From that moment his thoughts were of the wife who was coming to him, and one day a year after his dream, he felt impelled to fit his house up as for a bride. The servants gossiped and the friends gossiped, but no one dared question him, and when the final thing was arranged, the last packing case undone he went to Hongkong, ordering his boat to be kept in the stream in readiness. As he walked on the Bund that day he chanced to glance up at the colonnaded veranda of the old Victoria Hotel, and 'our eyes met and each held a light of recognition.' "

All of this he told her and more, as he held her in his arms, and she, making room on the divan for him, also put her arms about him and told him how she had been called and had answered without fear.

There had been years of perfect joy, with one great sorrow, the loss of a little son. But others had come in his place, and the years had only added joys. Never a thought of the outside world had troubled them. At first she longed to let her people know how happy she was, but the dread of the complications the knowledge of her life would bring frightened her. So, until six weeks ago, no word had gone from her to them, except the one sent a week after her flight, saying "Am well and happy."

"That is the outline of her beautiful love story as she told it to me today. "He returns tomorrow, and I am happy to think that I can meet him with the feeling that the sight of Nell's radiant happiness gives me instead of that other one that I came with.

"The children are veritable love children - beautiful, intelligent and charming, and they are to have their chance, as both Nell and he recognise that under such peculiar conditions and with such a strong admixture of European blood, they may desire other environments. They both have, while loving the children adoringly, a strange apartness. The children are simply incidental to the fulfilling of that law which joins two beings who had been separated by oceans, continents, race, color, manners and customs.