“Perhaps your mother’s friends have given you something Chinese which these men want?” he suggested, and again saw the frown. Somehow he knew that it did not indicate hostility to, or annoyance with, himself.

“I have a bangle,” she said; “but I do not wear it.”

She stopped, opened a silver bag she carried on her wrist, and took out a small jade bracelet. It was set about at intervals by tiny bands of gold.

“May I see it?”

She passed it to him. They were nearing Marble Arch, and she had insensibly slackened her pace. Now they both stopped whilst he examined the ornament. He scrutinised it carefully. Between each band was an inscription, half obliterated by wear.

“This bangle is two thousand years old,” he said simply, and she gasped.

“Two thousand!” she repeated incredulously.

“Two thousand,” he repeated. “This is quite valuable.”

“I know,” she said shortly.

He detected something of resentment in her tone.

“What do those characters mean?” she asked. “Is it something I shouldn’t know?” she asked quickly.

She looked up at his face. There was a dull flush on his face and a strange light in his eyes.

He fingered the jade bracelet absently.

“There is nothing you should not know,” he said briefly--for him. “There is much that I have wanted to know for years.”

She was puzzled, and showed it.

“Listen,” he said, and read, turning the bracelet slowly as he read:

“I am Shun the son of the great mechanic Chu-Shun upon whom the door fell when the Emperor passed. This my father told me before the day, fearing the treachery of the eunuchs. Behold the pelican on the left wall with the bronze neck… afterwards the spirit steps of jade… afterwards river of silver, afterwards… door of bronze. Here Emperor… behind a great room filled with most precious treasures.”

He read it twice, then handed the bracelet to the girl. She looked at him for the space of a minute. Here, in the heart of prosaic London, with the dull roar of the traffic coming to them gustily across the sparse herbage of a most commonplace park, Shun the son of Chu-Shun spoke across the gulf of twenty centuries.

“It is very wonderful,” she said, and looked at the bracelet.

“I think you had better let me keep this bracelet,” he said; “at any rate for a while. I beg you to believe”--he raised his hand solemnly--“that I consider only your own safety, and I am moved to the suggestion by the knowledge that you attach no sentimental value to the ornament, that it was given to you by somebody whom your mother likes, but who is repugnant to you, and that you only wear it in order to save yourself the discomfort and exasperation of a daily argument with your parent.”

She stared at him in open-eyed amazement.

“How--how did you know that?” she asked.

“You carry it in your bag. You frowned when you took it out to show me,” he said cheerfully. “You carry it in your bag only because you must keep it by you in order to slip it on and off when you are out of somebody’s sight. If it were your fiancé, you would either wear it or leave it at home--engaged people clear up their differences as they go along. Evidently you are a lady of strong character, strong enough to respect the foibles or the demands of your elders. Therefore it must be your father or your mother; and since fathers are naturally indignant and notoriously unsentimental, I cannot imagine that he would insist----”

“Thank you,” she said hurriedly. “Will you keep the bracelet for me, and return it at your leisure to this address?”

She extracted a card from her bag, and he looked at it and read:

Miss Yvonne Yale.

406, Upper Curzon Street, S.W.

“Yvonne,” he read gravely. “I’ve never known anybody named Yvonne.”

He put the bracelet in his inside pocket, and buttoned the worn coat again.

“I have no card,” he said. “I am Captain Ted Talham of the Victorian Mounted Infantry, of the Bechuanaland Mounted Police, of the Imperial Bushmen, and I am, in addition, a general in the army of the Dowager Empress of China, a mandarin of the Fourth Class, and a wearer of the Sun of Heaven and the Imperial Dragon Orders.”

He recited this with all gravity. There was no glint of humour in his eyes. The girl checked her smile when she realised how serious this good-looking man was. There was pride in the recital of his dignities: it was a very important matter that he should be Captain of Irregular Horse, and as tremendous a happening that he should wear the decorations of the Manchu dynasty.

She held out her hand.

“I am sure my mother will be glad to meet you,” she said, “and as for myself I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you should have been so providentially at hand this afternoon.”

He bowed, a ceremonious and correct little bow.

“That is the luck of the game,” he said.

There was an awkward pause. He was so evidently trying to say something more.

“I think it is right, and it is my duty,” he said at last, “to point out to you the very significant fact that so far I have not offered you my address. This,” he went on oracularly, “is all the more significant and alarming when I tell you that the intrinsic value of the bangle”--he tapped his pocket--“is anything from fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred pounds.”

“Impossible!” said the startled girl.

It was altogether an amazing afternoon.

He nodded.

“Possibly the latter figure,” he said. “Let the fact sink into your mind, and add to it the alarming intelligence that I have no address, and I have no address because I have exactly three yen in unchangeable Chinese silver between myself and the ravening world.”

A wave of pity surged over the girl, and there were tears in her eyes--tears that sprang most unexpectedly from unsuspected wells of sympathy.

She fumbled in her bag, but he stopped her.

“I beg of you,” he said reproachfully. “If you can’t trust me with two thousand pounds’ worth of jade, believe me, I can trust you with my secret, and a secret is only existent just so long as either of the two parties affected do nothing overtly or covertly to destroy the basic foundation upon which it rests. My secret is momentary penury--remove that and the secret ceases to be.”

He would have said more, but checked himself.

“In fact,” he concluded, “if you offer me money, I shall offer you your jade bangle, and there will be the end of the matter.”

She was laughing now--her eyes danced with merriment.

There was something amusing in the situation. This seedy gentleman with his unchangeable yen, his problematical dinner and bed, with two thousand pounds in his inside pocket, appealed to her sense of the grotesque. If young De Costa knew! Young change-counting, bill-checking, tipless De Costa, who had given her two thousand pounds in the innocence of his heart.

“Promise me that you will call?” she asked laughingly, “with or without the bangle.”

“With the bangle,” he said. “To-night I shall make it very clear to the ‘Noble Child,’ ‘Hope of the Spring,’ and ‘Star of the Yamen’ that the bracelet has passed to my possession and that henceforward if they wish to follow its wearer they must follow me.”

He shook hands again, lifted his hat, and turning abruptly, left her.