Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/232

of all races, all faiths—gulping down life in greedy mouthfuls.

And still the peace in Yu Ching's heart was perfect and exquisite. Still he smiled. Still, mechanically, his lips mumbled the words of the Buddha:

"By day shineth the sun. By night shineth the moon. Shineth also the warrior in harness of war. But the Buddha, at all times by day and by night, shineth ever the same, illuminating the world, calm, passionless, serene—"

The end of his soul's pilgrimage. …

And presently—to-day, to-morrow, next year, ten years from now—his body would die, and his spirit would leap the dragon gate, would blend its secret essence with the eternal essence of the Buddha's soul. … And what else mattered?

He bent his head.

"Fire and night and day art Thou," he whispered, "and the fortnight of waxing moon—and the months of the sun's northern circuit—"

The end of his pilgrimage!

And the beginning had been hard. For he had loved Marie Na Liu. He had not wanted to harm her.

But the Voice had spoken to him in the night, asking him to arise and throw off the shackles of desire, the fetters of the flesh; to forget the illusions; telling him that, whatever meritorious results might be attained by prayers and sacrifices, by austerities and gifts, there was no sacrifice to be compared with that of a man's own heart. Such a sacrifice was the excellent sanctifier—exhaustless in result.

"Sure," had said Bill Devoy, a detective of Second Branch and detailed to the Pell Street beat of opium and sewer gas and yellow man and white; he had