It was a bright, hot day—a blue and gold day, without a trace of Hong Kong mist and murk—and the windows in the manager's room were open wide. The furniture was sparse but rich; it was Robert Gregory's own room, and he was of the type of business man who likes to do himself well in the format of his office routine, more in a sincere pride in his business cult than in personal vanity or any pampering of self, and also in a well-defined theory of advertisement: Persian carpets and Spanish mahogany desks indicate a firm's prosperity clearly. Gregory's furniture was very expensive, but sensible, solid and untrimmed. He earned and amassed money in big ways and in small, but, in the main, he left the spending of it on fripperies to Hilda and his wife. A photograph of Hilda—the one ornament the office confessed to—stood on her father's desk, in a splendid wide frame that might have been Chinese, so costly and so barbaric was it, had only the design and the workmanship been better. But if the picture was somewhat over-*framed, its girl-subject was not over-dressed, for English Hilda, who from her father's office table smiled up at all the world, was several inches more décolleté than even the moon had ever seen Nang Ping.
But modesty and even decency are as much virtues of the eye that looks as of the creatures of its glance; and John Bradley, sitting in Robert Gregory's chair, saw only maidenhood delectable and flawless in the picture his eyes sought again and again. And any man who, to Robert Gregory's knowledge, had seen anything coarser, Robert Gregory would have shot cheerfully.
Holman, Gregory's head clerk, sat moodily opposite the priest, looking out into the quay. The long window he faced was the apartment's most conspicuous feature, and through it outrolled a teeming panorama of steam-
