Mr. Moto Is So Sorry by John P. Marquand

it’s only about a passport. I was afraid it was something else. If anything happens, I’m going to stop your being a hero, Gates.” And then her smile died away as she glanced up at him; his face was set and hard.
    â€œI hope to heaven you can,” he said.

CHAPTER X
    The sun moved with the hours of the afternoon in its arc across a warm blue sky where a few thin grayish clouds were floating. It moved deliberately with the hours until it was so low over the limitless rolling plain that the light became benign and soft and the horizon assumed a reddish hue that was reflected on the clouds, making them shell pink and purple. The waning light softened the harsh outlines and made the walled towns that they passed mysteriously remote in a sort of timeless loneliness and endowed the whole country with an exotic portentous beauty. The train moved through that level country as surely as though the hours were pulling it. The map showed him that they were nearing the venerable city of Shan-hai-kuan by the first gate in the great wall of China of which he had heard so much but knew so little. The motion of the train through that changing but changeless country was almost reassuring.
    Miss Dillaway looked out the window, and her face made a sharp, incisive profile, as clear and even as the profile on a coin.
    â€œI was born in Winnetka, Illinois,” Miss Dillaway said suddenly, and she was evidently speaking her thoughts aloud. “I went to Chicago University and then I went to art school. I started as a commercial artist. I had to earn my living. I’m not bad at accurate work. You’ve never had to earn your living, have you Gates?”
    â€œWhat made you guess that?” Calvin asked her.
    â€œYour attitude,” she answered. “You just look that way. It might have saved you trouble if you’d had to earn your living. It gets you in closer touch with facts.”
    â€œI’ll have to earn my living from now on,” he said.
    She leaned forward under some sudden impulse and rested her hand for a moment on his knee, and that momentary contact startled him.
    â€œWhat’s the trouble at home?” she asked. “You’d better tell me, Gates.”
    â€œI’d rather not,” he said, “if you don’t mind.”
    It was no use. Whether he explained or not, in another day or two he would never see Miss Sylvia Dillaway again.
    â€œAll right,” said Miss Dillaway. “If you don’t want to talk, reach me down my sketching box, the big one on the rack there.”
    She sat with her sketching box on the opposite seat, counting tubes of oil paint, arranging and rearranging all the tools of her trade as if she had forgotten his existence.
    She was like others he had known who could retire suddenly behind the walls of their own interests, leaving him alone. She had asked for his confidence, but he was sure that it would have done no good to have talked about himself. It was better to try to live in the present and to examine the utter strangeness of that present. When he looked out of the window there was nothing in the scene which reminded him of anything, no face or voice in the train which reminded him of anything.
    In one sense that unfamiliarity was a relief, but in another it was not. He had to walk dumbly through a world he did not know, coping with a language which he did not understand, while he waited for some event to occur that he could not anticipate. Thoughtlessly, he put his hand into the side pocket of his coat and for a second what he felt there surprised him. He had almost forgotten the automatic pistol, and he still had not the remotest idea why it had been given him. Nevertheless he was glad that he had it.
    Every now and then the train boy moved past him, a young uniformed Japanese, and once or twice a member of the train guard paced slowly down the aisle. Since he had boarded the train again after his interview at that station, it seemed