CHAPTER XII

It was not late the next morning when Mr. Sên’s orchids came—to Lady Snow, of course. He sent nothing to Miss Gilbert—but she could scarcely expect her confession-book back so soon. One wrote in confession-books at one’s leisure, and when in the mood. That was understood.

“I wonder if he’ll pay his dinner-call today?” Emma said to her husband, when at lunch he’d remarked on the splendid blooms on the table, and she’d mentioned who had sent them.

“I don’t suppose he’s going to live here,” Ivy Gilbert remarked rather unnecessarily.

“I don’t suppose he is,” Lady Snow said cheerfully, “but he’s sure to call promptly—Charlie said so.”

“I?” the knight she’d quoted demanded.

“You said the Chinese were punctiliously polite. It amounts to the same thing.”

“Bless my soul!” Sir Charles muttered.

“I think I’ll go out calling tomorrow instead of today. I’d be vexed to miss him.”

“Do you like Mr. Sên?” Ivy asked indifferently.

“I don’t dislike him. I thought he was good fun. Do you, Ivy?”

“Which?”

“Both.”

“He is not my idea of fun.”

“Nor mine,” Sir Charles added.

“But he doesn’t bore me—if that’s what you mean,” the girl owned lazily. “As for liking him—I don’t know him. I’ve met him three or four times. What does that amount to? And, you know, my likes are few. They don’t stretch to China.”

“Nor your knowledge,” her cousin Charles reminded her.

Ivy nodded contentedly. She was not interested in China or in the Chinese; and she was not going to pretend that she was, even to please dear old Charlie. She’d be polite—for him—but surely that was enough. “Wouldn’t you better put your orchids in the drawing-room, Em?” she said, with a laugh.

“I intend to,” Lady Snow retorted. “There is a big vase full there already. I brought these in here for Charlie to enjoy.”

“Thank you, my dear.” He might have added—but did not—that he did not care for orchids, except when they were growing.

“But I shall only have them in here at meals.”

“The peripatetic orchids,” Ivy said gaily. “Well, you and the orchids will have to entertain Mr. Sên all alone, Emma, if he comes. I’m off to Miss Julia’s.”

“I rather think I’ll have plenty of visitors today—though it isn’t my day,” Lady Snow returned. “It is in the Post, and it’s sure to be copied in the Evening Star, that Mr. Sên King-lo dined here last night.”

“Great Scott!” was her husband’s comment.

Ivy giggled.

“Yes,” Emma told her, “I did. Justine knows a reporter. I never have any difficulty getting my nice bits in.”

“I wouldn’t do that, dear,” Snow said uncomfortably.

“Of course you wouldn’t. You’re a man. I shall. I like them in. Marion Lawson will be green. He never dined there en famille.”

“You didn’t put that in!” her cousin cried. And Sir Charles looked distinctly disturbed.

“No,” Lady Snow owned. “But I shall tell Marion.”

“I’m sure you will,” Ivy laughed, and the man retired philosophically to his ice-pudding.

“You’d have looked nice if he hadn’t turned up after all,” the girl remarked.

“Well—” the other confessed, “I almost was in a wee panic. But I felt pretty safe. He’d accepted, and Charlie says their word is as good as another man’s bond.”

This time her husband did not expostulate or contradict.

They were dining out that evening, and Ivy hurried back in time to dress.

“Well,” she asked, as they drove away towards Fifteen-and-one-half Street, “did Mr. Sên call, Emma?”

“No,” Lady Snow admitted, “he didn’t. But half the girls in Washington did. Emmeline Hamilton called, of course. She came early and stayed late. I thought she’d never go. She stole an orchid. And when she saw that I’d seen her sneak it into her vanity bag, she simpered and sighed—like this——”

Ivy giggled.

Sir Charles told her, “You giggle just like a Chinese girl, Ivy.”

She frowned with vexation. It was too much! Her own cousin!

“Oh—” he had seen the frown—it was still light—“you needn’t frown. Chinese girls have the prettiest giggles imaginable—not a scrap like our women giggle—for all the world like the tinkle of ivory bells. So is yours. I say, giggle again. Can you?”

Ivy gave him a dagger look.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed, “I’m blowed if you don’t look a bit Chinese too sometimes. Your eyes—or something. And you do tonight in that gown, and with those stick-pin things in your hair.”

The girl bit her lip sharply. She was wearing her new red dress again—she never had many gowns to choose from—and the garnet rings dangled in her hair. Charlie had seen what the Chinese man had claimed to see. It was intolerable!

When Ivy Gilbert followed Lady Snow into the drawing-room the girl’s eyes were still stormy.

That was on Tuesday.

Sên King-lo called on Lady Snow the next afternoon. She was out, and her cousin was with her. Mr. Sên left three cards.

On Thursday he came duly to breakfast—five minutes before the hour.

To his surprise, and then amusement, and not a little to Ivy’s dismay, Sên King-lo and Miss Gilbert had breakfast alone.

The children, who as a rule shared and excited that meal with their parents, were closely interned in their schoolroom quarters, because of unattractive colds that might, their mother thought, develop into whooping-cough. A cable from Downing Street had sent Sir Charles in hot haste and breakfastless to the British Embassy an hour ago. His wife had danced a slight but painful sprain into her left ankle the night before, and was obliged to breakfast in bed.

Miss Gilbert explained and apologized, and led the way to the breakfast-room.

Sên had the tact not to offer to defer his breakfast visit. It would have been an enormity, of course, but for some puzzle of a reason Ivy had half expected it. And it had crossed Lady Snow’s mind that he might—but she had not said so.

Miss Gilbert was annoyed, and still more annoyed that she was. But her annoyance wore off quickly. Sên King-lo saw to that as deftly as unobtrusively. He greatly regretted missing Sir Charles. But he accepted the small situation quite as the very small thing it was, and set himself to dispel the displeasure that he clearly saw, though Miss Gilbert felt sure that she hid it completely.

He thought that this girl with the intangible but haunting something of China about her, disliked him. He did not resent it in the least. He himself disliked a good many acquaintances. He was sorry for her that the three small family accidents had driven her into a tête-à-tête meal that he saw jarred. It didn’t enchant him. He preferred looking at Miss Gilbert to talking to her. But he scarcely could gaze at her in silence from melon to preserved ginger—so he addressed himself to chat away her ill-ease and displeasure. Why she had elected to ride with him at all still puzzled him. He was sorry she had, and vexed with himself that he had troubled her with the invitation. He’d make it up to her as well as he could. She should enjoy that ride if he could contrive it.

Why she so minded breakfasting alone with Sên King-lo was a question the girl herself could have answered but lamely. She often had lunched alone with a man friend, and as often had given tea in Emma’s absence to a man she knew even more slightly than she did Mr. Sên. If she could ride with this man, it was no great odds to break her cousin’s bread with him. Uncle Lysander’s smoldering disapproval at her elbow might have disconcerted her a little perhaps—for, while it angered her, she must have somewhat sympathized with it. It is not pleasant, unless one is very self-sure indeed, to feel that the servant who offers you cutlets and omelette considers you bad form. But the Snow servants—except Justine—were all English, and it was evident that neither Dawson nor William saw any indignity in bending over Mr. Sên’s chair. She did not know why she disliked this breakfast so—but she did. Unreasonable, perhaps. But the fact stood.

For all his intelligence Sên King-lo was at fault in his explanation of the displeasure he recognized. It did not occur to him that this English girl did not object to breakfasting alone with him, but with a Chinese. He put it all down to a personal dislike of him personally. It did not vex him in the least. Had he believed that she thought him beneath her—which he did not—it would not have vexed him. Had he realized that it was the Chinese race that she looked down upon and considered socially unfit, it would have vexed him as little. Sên King-lo, the sash-wearer, was even more sure, far more sure, of his race than he was of himself. His estimate of self was humble. His estimate of China was very proud. He was proud and joyous to be Chinese.

They breakfasted briefly, but before he moved back her chair, Ivy had confessed to herself that the West had done this stranger within its far gates well—for, if Mr. Sên never had seen a Chinese girl, he exquisitely knew how to treat an English girl, and how to care for her tiniest comforts. And she complimented Western sojourn and example for what centuries of Chinese breeding had given—as nothing else can.

They went to their waiting horses, outwardly cordial, but inwardly each was a little perturbed. Ivy very much doubted if he could ride—what she called ride. He dressed the part without fault, which she always had thought that only a British man could do—but, after all, it was much a matter of tailor and boot-maker; no doubt Mr. Sên had a London tailor. Sên wondered how well his companion could ride. He loved to go. Never mind—he reproached himself—this was her ride, and, if she couldn’t ride, they’d walk. And she should enjoy herself—this girl with his mother’s name—who was starting off, he knew, so reluctantly. Why, he wondered again, was she going at all?

She could mount—that was his first discovery. She rose a feather-weight from his hand. Her discovery was that her unusual escort could mount her at all. That he did it expertly was a pleasant surprise. And she realized that his slender hand had been rock-firm under her foot. It was a good beginning at least. In the pleasure of even that small relief she smiled down at him graciously as he straightened her habit.

“Why, Mr. Sên,” she laughed, “you must have mounted many girls. I thought from what you said the other night that you scarcely had ridden with one.”

He laughed back at her, lingering a moment at her bridle. “I never have ridden with one, Miss Gilbert—never with any girl. But I have mounted a great number of ladies—one any number of times—no less a personage than a duchess—the Duchess of Westershire. So, you see, I’ve had distinguished practice.”

“Never!” the English girl cried. “The Duchess of Westershire must weigh fourteen stone, if she weighs an ounce.”

“Nearer forty, I’d wager.”

“You needn’t tell me she can ride.”

“She can mount,” Sên insisted.

“Didn’t she crack your hand in two?”

“Went up like down.”

“Did she ride to hounds?”

“She rode towards them,” Sên stated guardedly.

Ivy chuckled. And Sên King-lo swung up into his saddle.

It was a better beginning than Miss Gilbert realized. Make a Chinese laugh, or help him to laugh, and his world is yours—at least for the moment.

They eyed each other’s horsemanship guilefully. There was nothing for either to cavil at yet. The girl’s seat was perfect. Sên’s was no less.

Still he was cautious. The groom behind heard them laugh more than once—but it was she who suggested, as they turned into Dupont Circle, “A little faster?”

Still Sên King-lo set but a moderately quickened pace. They still were keeping it so when they met Miss Smith face to face. But he had no doubt now that this girl could ride, and her English eyes, almost as quick to horsemanship as his were to most things, knew that Sên King-lo rode as well as a Derby jockey.

And, if he rode today to please a girl who—he thought—disliked him, Sên King-lo rode to win.

They rode far, and after the banks of Rock Creek they pushed on into the country, and rode faster and faster.

“How joyous!” she called to him once, in a camaraderie that knew no race distinctions.

“Glorious, isn’t it!” Sên answered.

“You ride better than Charles does even,” she told him blithely; “and you ride our English fashion. You rise in your saddle.”

“I learned to ride in England when I was a boy at school,” he explained. “But I usually ride American fashion when I jog off by myself.”

“Why?” she asked quickly.

“I enjoy it more.”

“Oh,” the girl said, a little disdainfully.

“You ought to try it,” he ventured. “Don’t you think it prettier?”

But the English girl would not own that. “Our way is the kinder,” she insisted.

“To the nags? Yes,” Sên agreed, “it certainly seems so. But your cavalrymen did not rise in their stirrups until recently. You should try it—sometimes.”

She shook her head.

“I don’t like learning new ways, Mr. Sên.”

“Or languages?”

“You don’t call Chinese a new language, do you?”

“It would be to you,” he retorted. “By the way, there are a great many distinct Chinese languages, nearly sixty. I wonder which you’d admire—least.”

“Horrors!” the girl cried. But she laughed softly—because he had said “least” when she’d thought he was going to say “most.”

And he laughed back at her, because the speed they’d gone was tingling in his blood.

“Thank you, Mr. Sên,” she said, as they stood waiting for Dawson or William to open the door. “I have so enjoyed it.”

“Truly?” He asked it gravely.

“I’ve loved it,” she told him.

“I wonder then,” Dawson heard him say, “if you’ll let me take you again some day?”

“I’d love it,” she answered.

The Chinese man gave her a grateful look. It was sincere. He was grateful that a girl who disliked him, had had—as he knew she had—a good time. And he was gratified that he had done what he had tried to do. Sên King-lo was very human.

That afternoon he sent Lady Snow a wealth of flowers—a note of condolence for her accident, all fragrant with their perfume.

And this time Ivy too had her tribute, tea-roses, and on the card he sent with them Sên King-lo had written a word: “Thanks.”

Again Miss Gilbert took her blossoms to her own room. There were flowers enough in the drawing- and sitting-rooms, and Emma’s room looked like a flower-show. Ivy put her roses in water—one bud she tucked in her gown. She was fond of tea-roses.

CHAPTER XIII

As he walked his horse slowly back to his rooms, Sên King-lo, thinking the morning over, concluded that he liked the girl he had just ridden with very much indeed. And he began to suspect that she was more interesting than he had thought her. They had not said a great deal to each other this morning—and none of it even remotely profound. He had had to make all the conversational running at breakfast; and on horseback, when the pace is swift, as most of their long ride had been, is not provocative or well calculated for profound or subtle conversation. But a thought-straw or two from the chaff of her small talk had pointed, he thought, to a mental equipment less ordinary than he had suspected. And she had seemed even younger today—looked younger too, in the searching early light, though less Chinese in her businesslike English riding gear than she had to him before—and she had seemed to him intrinsically young each time they had met—as untraveled twenty-two usually does to traveled twenty-seven. Youth appealed to Sên King-lo. Being Chinese, deeply and typically so, he sincerely reverenced age, felt for it unaffected affection; but it did not lure him—and he was in no way un-Chinese in this. Her youth appealed to his. Next to beauty, what lured him most, as they most lure all of his race, were loyalty, breeding and pluck—probably the first and the last because they tune and key with the loyalty that is deep-grained in most Chinese, and with the pluck that is innate in them all. Her reserve had seemed to him from the first a trait of breeding, in no way a trait of shyness. In truth, Ivy Gilbert had less claim to the title of “sash-wearer” than he had—and less than he thought she showed. Her birth was far less aristocratic than his, not so much because his ancestors had been noble and distinguished for untarnished centuries when hers were wading wode-clad or wodeless in the unreclaimed marshlands of Thorney, as because many a plebeian ancestor had contributed to her being, and not one to his. So far back that she barely knew it, and thought of it as the long-off, hazy thing it was, there had been strawberry-leaves in Ivy Gilbert’s ancestry, but both they and their bar sinister smelt strongly of fish now—not the salt, fishy tang of scaled giants caught with peril and prowess, but the staler smell of fish in shrouds of parsley and ice on tradesmen’s marble slabs.

Ivy’s ancestry was as weird a patchwork as was ever a New England quilt. Sên King-lo’s was one almost royal blue. And it had no bar sinister. There are few bar sinisters in China. Perhaps the Chinese manage man’s wide-flung proclivities more wisely than we do. It could be argued. Certainly they punish little children for prenatal happenings less than we do. They suffer them all to come welcomed and desired into life, suffer them all to wear with untainted right their father’s name—and, not less a boon and a gladness, to love their mothers and be loved by their mothers unashamed. The twenty little flags of British preference and prejudice she’d fluttered out, scarcely with cause, each time they’d met, he took for a young and feminine display of a loyalty that was both sound and sweet. He liked her for it. Her open affection and pride for her cousin Charles, he liked her for, even more. Chinese loyalty has been for its thousands of years far more a thing of family and clan than of country or race—and Young China has had scant time to alter that yet; and it was not altered in Sên King-lo. Her good-natured and sunny treatment of him—so disliking him—he was very sure she disliked him—seemed to him both good-breeding and pluck.

To a point he was right. It had been both—at first. For some quirk or reason—he, try as he would, could not yet fathom what it was—she had ridden with him sorely against her inclination, and having done it of her own untrammeled determination—or freak—she had paid the small social debt it obligated in sunny, good humored companionship; too socially honest, too well-bred to default. Sên King-lo liked her for that. Her honesty appealed to him—true son that he was of a race that must, to a man, pay all its debts in full at least once a year. Of how many peoples can that be said? And again, Sên was right, up to a point. The girl was too well-bred, too socially honest, having gone with him voluntarily, to treat him sourly or over-stiffly, and not to do so had taken pluck—at first. And he liked her for riding so well, as any man who was horse-fond must have done.

Yes—he liked her. He liked her, of the women he knew here, next to Miss Julia Townsend, perhaps. And he certainly liked her very much more than he did even the least unlikeable of the unmarried girls and matrons who banded together to “run after” him—a free, if not easy, inter-racial attention that Sên King-lo valued the tawdry freak thing it was. It both had amused and had bored him. But it never had flattered him. For the quality of her liking, her friendship, her kindness, King-lo loved Miss Julia. But for no one else in Christendom had he ever felt any affection, until something of that feeling suddenly had sprung in him as he sat alone in the dining-room with Sir Charles Snow.

This young Chinese was as little given to sudden likings as the slow-to-decide Englishman was. But there are affinities of manliness and of tastes that brook no delay, that defy barriers. And the quick and sure Chinese intuition of the younger man had leapt to Snow’s worth and congeniality almost on the instant.

Now and then, across the stretch of East and West, there are hands that touch, and having touched, clasp.

Sên King-lo did not like Miss Gilbert—the girl with the Chinese-like flower names—the less because she was Charles Snow’s cousin, or that the cousinly bond between them so evidently was strong and close.

One thing, at least, Sên disliked in his new girl-acquaintance: the little she seemed to care for her small cousins. He had not seen her with them—or seen them at all—and he hoped her indifference to them was merely a verbal barrage to screen and defend from a stranger, a sentiment too exquisite to be shown to a passing acquaintance, above all not to one whom she disliked. He hoped that—for the sake of his new ride-born liking of her—but he rather doubted it. He thought her pluck was more than her artifice; her indifference had rung true enough. And to his Chinese thinking even the slight ailment that kept her little cousins prisoners in their own rooms would have been sufficient excuse for the kinswoman, who had an almost maternal office over them, to have denied herself to him altogether this morning, and have sent him and his horse away from the door. They might be suffering, the poor little tender things—and yet she had laughed and galloped, and her color had deepened joyously, and her brown eyes sparkled care-free and happy. Was she callous?

All Chinese adore all children. Nothing else in our West so repels them as that there are among us some that do not.

He hoped he was wrong—she had seemed fond of her horse.

When he had tubbed again, Sên had his lunch-chop and hock alone. Washington is as “dry” now as an autumn leaf in drought-time, of course; and was then. But there still are cellars in Washington. In his own house a man, and his guests, may do as he likes with his own. It seems unlikely to be so long, but it is measurably so now. And the Chinese Legation had its cellar—a very good cellar, though rarely broached except on “guest-nights”; and Sên had its freedom. He would not have bought hock now, imported since 1914. He did not relish Colonial wines. But the hock that had been bought and paid for—he feared it had been paid for—before the War, he drank and enjoyed.

It was no new thing for Sên to eat alone. For so popular and courted a man, he spent a great deal of time in his own nook—his oak well-sported. And for so busy a man, he seemed to have, or to make himself, a great deal of leisure.

To be alone, and to be at leisure rather frequently, was a necessity of his Chinese being. He spoke three European tongues idiomatically, and almost without accent. He spoke English so well that when he did, he thought in English. A very rare and delicate feat that! He could do most things that Englishmen could do, and some of them he did better than many Englishmen could. His Western on-growths were genuine and vigorous. But they all were graftings. No sap of them had permeated backwards into the trunk or core of his nature. In all of them some Chinese sap flowed and tinged. Sên King-lo was thoroughly Chinese—as essentially Chinese as if he never had left the Ho-nan home of his birth. It is in solitude, communing with self, communing more with Nature, that every Chinese takes his spiritual ease, has his spiritual growth, leads his intensest, truest life. It is then that he lives—even more than when he sits with his hand on his mother’s girdle, or his children’s hands on his skirt. Except the most toil-stunted of the working-class, every Chinese must be alone sometimes, or perish. And even the work-driven coolie, who labors and toils and reeks in his sweat almost from dawn to dawn, snatches a soul-breather now and then, alone with his pipe, or a growing flower, a bamboo clump, a rushing river’s bank, a bird on a bough. He must.

A Chinese criminal on his way to the indescribable execution ground, will lag a moment to buy a flower, and sniff at it joyously, as he trudges on to his hideous death. Give any Chinese child its choice between a toy and a graceful spray of sweet-scented honeysuckle, invariably it takes the blossoms.

And every Chinese—young or old, rich or poor—knows how to be alone, makes solitude a dignity, and gives it charm, and reaps from it—much.

Sên King-lo did not go out again that day or evening.

When he had lunched—he had called at the florist’s on his way home, and had written his note to Lady Snow at his club, before he went to New Hampshire Avenue—he curled up on a divan with a book—poems that Po-Chii-i had written eleven hundred years ago. He read slowly and steadily—pausing to dream now and then—reading many verses over and over—while the pleasant noises of Washington droned unheeded in at his wide-open window, and he did not lay Po-Chii-i’s old singing aside till Kow Li brought in his tea: true Chinese tea that can be bought in no Western shop. But Sên made no ceremony of his tea-drinking, though it cost him neither cream nor sugar. And he munched a toasted, buttered muffin and two plump éclairs to the last crumb.

When Kow Li had cleared away the small tea-service, Sên sat, until it was time to change for dinner, almost without moving in his easy-chair—and thought. It’s a Chinese habit—the breath of the Chinese mind. A Chinese must meditate—or die. Even the babies, and the shrill-tongued babbling women, meditate in China.

“Where there is no vision the people perish.”

Though he was dining alone in his own sitting-room, Sên dressed for dinner as scrupulously as if he’d been an English subaltern alone in a remote dâk bungalow about to dine off half-roasted but wholly grown goat and undergrown plantains, washed down by criminal and luke-warm beer. There was not a little of the English gentleman in Sên King-lo, not a few English characteristics, habits and traits that in no way clashed with Chinese—or that were Chinese as well. And there were a number of Western superficialities that he preferred to their Eastern substitutes. He not only liked silver forks better than he did ivory chop-sticks, and glass finger-bowls better than a steaming wet towel, and preferred mattress, blankets, sheets and soft pillows, to a mat and a hard cylinder pillow—though in England, and when well dog-tired after a hunting day, he more than once had sat up all night, in protest against the feather-bed his hostess had assigned to him—but he had grown so accustomed to English clothes that he no longer realized how much more comfortable, and in most ways preferable, were the men’s garments of old Pekin.

With his after-dinner cigarette, Sên remembered the confession he’d promised to make—in a book. Where was it? Kow would know, and when Sên rang, Kow did.

Sên made himself very comfortable in his biggest arm-chair, and leisurely studied the book. In a way, it proved better worth the trouble than confession-books often do. Ivy had passed it about with discrimination. A number of distinguished men, and one or two such women, had written in it; notables whose acquaintance she had owed, no doubt, to Sir Charles. As he read and studied, Sên grew really interested. His “mea culpa” was going into uncommonly good-fellowship. There was not a nobody there! Unless Miss Gilbert herself was “no one.” Certainly Julia Calhoun Townsend was not even remotely a nobody. And almost every other name signatured there was known and reputed beyond both the width and the length of the Potomac.

He smiled reverently at Miss Julia’s spidery tellings—and read them twice for their perfume of a sweet and aromatic personality. Ivy’s own “confession” was naïve and girlish—written several years ago on the birthday the book had been given her. But it surprised even more than it interested him. It interested him even more than he knew. His browsing of it outlasted an entire cigarette; and Sên smoked slowly. Yes, the girl was interesting, and very much more intelligent than he had supposed. He wondered if many English girls of sixteen—the book told him that she’d been sixteen when she received it six years ago—were so intelligent and so out of the ruts. He looked at the date her “confession” gave, and he made a mental note of it. Then he thought better of that, and penciled a note on his cuff. But what surprised him most—and it amused him—was that several of her answers were identical with those he’d write in a few moments—if he wrote quite truly. So Grieg was her favorite composer as well as his own. There were several pastimes that he cared for even more than he did riding. But Velasquez and Turner were his favorite painters—of Western ones. Miss Gilbert could not be expected to have heard of Ma Yuen—much less to have seen even one of his silks. And he too preferred Thackeray to Dickens. Lemon-yellow was the color that too pleased him most. The harp was also his favorite instrument. Spain was not the country he most wished to see—for he had seen Spain, had spent almost a year there. What she most disliked was vulgarity and disloyalty. That was true of him. He thought best of the living reigning monarch of whom she did. Really—the thing was a little ridiculous. She liked prose better than she did poetry—well, that was one escape. And there were other safety-valves.

He rose with a light laugh, and carried the telltale volume to his writing-table—a table of hybrid impedimenta; for Sên King-lo usually brushed the letters he wrote to China; and he had no intention of forgetting to write his own language in the old Chinese way in which Tu Fu and Li T’ai Po and his own father had written it.

He found his vacant pages; a pair that followed a pair, and dipped his brush in the ink. And when he also had written in English and the last page was dry, he closed the book, and strolled to the still-open window. He’d send Kow Li with the book tomorrow. He had kept it long enough.

“What a woman wants, she wants quickly. Only men have the strength to wait.” Which of the philosophers had said that? Odd, he’d forgotten—but he had. Kow should carry the book back tomorrow, and ask for news of Lady Snow’s hurt, and of her children’s colds. He wished he had not sent those tea-roses today. Lilies-of-the-valley were her favorite flowers—a flower she never had seen was his. He’d like to send her valley lilies with her book. But you couldn’t send tea-roses one day and lilies-of-the-valley the next. Bother those roses!

He wondered if Miss Gilbert would ride with him again. He hoped so. But the next time, if there was one, should be fully as much her doing as his. That was only fair to her. Sên King-lo had neither wish nor willingness to push any woman’s inclination—not even Miss Julia’s, whose proved warm friendship gave him some license—least of all that of a girl who had no great liking for him or his company. But he wondered if she would pave the way for him to ask if they might go again. He hoped so. And a very slight and delicate pavement would do.

He strolled back from the window, and sat up till nearly daylight puzzling over a game of chess he was playing with a friend in Siangtan. But first he copied the date on his cuff into a notebook.

Kow Li did not go to Massachusetts Avenue the next day.

More ciphered cables come to Washington than those that are sent from Downing Street and Whitehall or Threadneedle and Lombard Streets. A disquieting cable came from Pekin to Sên King-lo as he breakfasted, and he forgot all about Miss Gilbert’s confession-book.

CHAPTER XIV

From East and from West the sea-covered wires ran with alarm and twanged with suspense for a week or more. Something like international crises threatened, and quivered the diplomatic air. Officials were suspiciously polite to those of other countries, and spoke to those of their own in crisp, bothered sentences. And the press in a dozen countries girded its loins, strained its ears, sharpened its imaginations, and looked carefully to its ink-wells.

Then the small “affair” passed—as happily sometimes it does—and Washington shook itself good-humoredly as after some spring drizzle that had had more notice than it deserved, but had done no particular harm; and got back to play—cotillions, tennis and moonlit river picnics.

And Sên found time to call on Lady Snow, and found her alone.

She was glad to see him, and said so.

“I am fortunate to find you at home this tempting day,” he returned. “You are quite well again?”

“Perfectly, thanks. It was nice of you to send twice to ask. You are about the only man who has troubled whether we were dead or alive—my ankle and me—these last ten days. I’ve scarcely seen a soul; and Sir Charles has about lived at the silly old Embassy—and not heard what I’ve said half the time when he has been here. And I suppose you have too; it was nice of you to think to send to ask after the kiddies and me.”

“But I could not forget to do that.”

“Couldn’t you? Several—that we’ve known longer than we have you—could. You’ve been desperately busy and excited, of course?”

“I’m a very small fish in the international sea—calm or troubled,” her guest insisted. “I wonder if you will let me——”

“Please, no!” his hostess cried, dramatically, her hands over her ears. “I know that you and Japan, and poor little Korea—you ought to be well ashamed of yourselves, both of you, for the way you’ve played battledore and shuttlecock with Korea—have been hoping to cut each other’s throats—but you cut lower down than throats, don’t you?”

“On occasions,” Sên admitted.

She gave him no time to say more, but caught her breath up where it had failed her—“and Germany planning to murder us all in our beds again, and Switzerland having the army photographed——”

“Miniatured, I should think,” he interjected.

“—and all the rest of it. But I decline to hear any details. I hate the lot of you. Why can’t you sit still, and be good, this terrifically hot weather? I’m desperately tired of State secrets.”

A white line gleamed between Sên’s lips. He had no intention of pressing Legation or Consulate secrets on Lady Snow, and he did not believe that Sir Charles surfeited her with State secrets.

“I should not have presumed to make that appalling blunder,” he said. “I was going to say that I wondered if you would let me see your children, Lady Snow. May I?”

He saw the flippancy fall from her face as snow fades in a sudden deluge of sunshine.

“You would like to see Dick and Blanche? Truly? I like you, Mr. Sên. Of course, you shall see them! And the dear little monkeys are worth seeing and knowing. I’m very proud of my babies; and I’ve a right to be. But not today. They’re gone to Rosehill with my cousin. Charlie’s at the Embassy, of course. He half promised to get home for tea—but he won’t! Just look at that clock. Do ring! We’ll have ours now. Dawson ought to have brought it ages ago. But probably I told them not to, until I rang—Sir Charles said he might come.”

Sên King-lo lingered a courteous length of time, after his second cup of tea. He took sugar and cream in it here. Lady Snow paid nearly two dollars a pound for her tea, but Sên King-lo thought that all such tea needed all the sugar and cream it could get.

Sir Charles did not come. Sên left a greeting for him, reminded Lady Snow of his wish to meet her children, repeated his pleasure at having seen her again, and went away.

He did not go home, or to his club. He crossed the Potomac. He had not seen Miss Townsend for several days; and not only she allowed him to call at any odd hour; but he knew that she liked him to do that. So, late as it was, and far afield, he went from Massachusetts Avenue to Rosehill.

“Yes, sar,” Uncle Lysander told him, his mistress was at home and certain sure he could go in—Lysander knew his standing orders, and knew better than to disobey them. But Dr. Elenore Ray caught a sultry tone in the old black’s voice as he announced at the open drawing-room door that “Mr. Swing”—an impertinence of mispronunciation in which he indulged himself now and then—“has done come to see you, Miss Julia, ma’am.”

“Have you lost your watch, or come to supper?” Miss Julia demanded bitingly. But her bright old eyes welled with welcome.

“Both!” Sên instantly lied.

“I suppose I shall have to give you your supper, then,” she complained—Miss Julia was in highest good humor. “I’m not sorry to see you,” she added. “I want you to know Dr. Elenore Prescott Ray. Elenore, may I present my friend, Mr. Sên King-lo?”

And Sên, having bowed, looked down at the face of the woman seated near Miss Townsend—a wonderful face, he thought; the finest, sweetest, and strongest face he ever had seen.

It was.

“We have been having a delightful afternoon, Mr. Sên,” Dr. Ray told him. “A children’s party. It has just gone home. I wasn’t invited. It was in full swing when I chanced to call. You have only just missed it.”

The telephone bell rang in the hall, and Miss Julia rose and left them. She was not in the telephone book. She looked coldly on telephones, as on a number of other and even more modern inventions, but she found hers useful in speaking to Washington tradesmen; and usually she answered and used it herself—Uncle Lysander was sickly afeared of the ’phone, and Dinah, her next most trusted servant, at the ’phone could do nothing but giggle into the receiver.

Her other guest turned to Sên with a pleasant smile that lit up her face, almost without moving it—chiefly a smile in her fine clear eyes.

“I have known Miss Townsend since we were very small girls, but I saw a new side of my old friend today. It was very charming to hear her telling stories to the mites who were here. She did it delightfully. I can’t tell you how they loved it. And how she loved doing it! It was touching.”

“Very,” said Sên gently.

Elenore Ray gave him a scanning look, and, at something she read there, he had made her his friend. But she only said quietly—for she, too, was a sash-wearer—“They were nice children—the tots that were here.”

“Very nice children,” Miss Julia emphasized, catching the last words as she came—it had been a wrong-number call—“they do their mother and their governess great credit. Well-behaved children are a true refreshment in these mad days.”

“I,” the physician laughed, “find naughty children a tonic.”

“I do not,” Miss Julia said sadly.

“I do!” her friend repeated. “And I make more money out of them. You see, I am an avaricious doctor, Mr. Sên.”

Sên laughed. “Was it a large party, Madame?” he asked.

“Quality and not quantity,” Miss Julia answered. “I wish you had come earlier.”

“I wish I had,” Sên King-lo replied.

“You’d have made us the even half-dozen. We were an odd number—five.”

“Why count me?” Dr. Ray asked. “I was but a looker-on in Venice.”

“Only two children—but such nice little things,” Miss Julia told Sên. “The Snows’ boy and girl. Their cousin brought them to spend the day with me. You remember her, don’t you? Miss Gilbert? She stayed the night of the garden party.”

“Oh, yes, I remember Miss Gilbert.”

“Didn’t you like her?” Miss Townsend demanded abruptly. She had caught the reserve in his tone; so had Dr. Ray and had interpreted it differently.

“Could I say so?” he asked gaily. “But I do like Miss Gilbert—very much.”

His hostess looked at him a little regretfully. She liked those she liked to like each other—and she had mistrusted his tone. But Dr. Ray threw him a shrewder glance. She, too, mistrusted his tone, and her mistrust took a different trend. Able in all her craft, diagnosis was her forte. She rarely erred in it. It was a great physician, the slender patrician that almost lounged, so assured and easy her sitting, in Miss Townsend’s great-grandfather’s favorite chair, a long history of sorrow and service carved on the face in which time and life had cut many, but only beautiful lines. Soft waves of snow covered a graceful, queenly-held head, and the long, thin hands, lying loosely on the great chair’s big arm-knobs, were as masterful as they were lovely—the polished finger-nails as rosy and mooned as a girl’s. She was a great physician, adding distinction to the profession it had cost her a hard, bitter fight—and sometimes a tortured one—to enter. But the physician armed with a genius for absolute diagnosis should not find professional greatness too far or too difficult a cry. She gave Sên King-lo a long steady look.

“You don’t know the Snows, do you?” Miss Julia asked him—more to retreat from a cul-de-sac she felt a trifle rasped than because she cared to know.

“Yes, Madame, I do—Sir Charles and his wife. I have not had the pleasure of meeting the small ones yet.”

“Oh—yes—I suppose you diplomatic-staff people all know each other, more or less, whether you care to or not.”

“We are apt to meet.”

“And I daresay you know every one in Washington now,” Julia remarked, rather purringly. She was proud of the place her once cold-shouldered protége had gained in the capital’s society that she herself rather scorned.

“I know a good many.” And this time Dr. Ray thought that there was nothing forced in the indifference of his tone.

“Do you like them—the Snows?” Miss Julia questioned again. It was her habit, and Sên’s delight, that she always questioned him as she liked.

“Very much,” he told her cordially.

“I like him,” Miss Townsend said, with no uncertain emphasis on the pronoun.

Sên King-lo sprang to the defense of an absent woman on whose face he but now had seen maternity’s beautiful blazon. “I like Lady Snow, Madame,” he remarked. “I am sure there is a great deal more in her than the chic prettiness that one sees and the gay banter one hears.”

“Do you?” From any one else the slight but patrician sniff would have sounded a rudeness. “I,” she continued, “know that there is very much more in Ivy Gilbert than shows on the surface. I am very fond of Ivy. I wish she had a gayer time. Girls should be gay. You liked Ivy, Elenore, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I liked her,” the other said promptly. “And I like her face.”

“I like all of her,” loyal Miss Julia insisted. “I shall ask the children here again. You must come, too, Mr. Sên.”

“Gladly. I asked Lady Snow today to let me see them. But, of course, she could not.”

“Because they were here. And that is why you came so late—when you knew they’d be gone! You must be anxious to meet them! So—you know Lady Snow well enough to call!”

“I was not sure they would be gone, Madame,” Sên said a little lamely.

“Humph!” Miss Julia commented.

Dr. Ray smiled at the carpet.

“I wish—yes, Lysander, we are coming,” for Lysander was bowing and grinning in the doorway, “I wish Ivy had a gayer time,” Miss Julia repeated as she led the way to the dining-room. “Every girl has a right to have a good time. As nice a girl as Ivy Gilbert has a right to a great deal of fun and gay good times. They need it,” she sighed softly, and Sên thought she looked sadly across her garden as they passed the hall’s wide windows. Her own girlhood had been defrauded of its gaiety-right—robbed by war’s seared and shriveled aftermath.

No pleasanter meal-time passed in Washington that night than passed at Miss Julia’s supper-table. The odd trio proved as congenial as it was odd. Of the two Southern women, one since babyhood had passed all her life here and a stone’s throw from here, and had lived all of it as her foremothers had lived in the old regnant Virginia days. The other was traveled, experienced, steeped in life’s up-and-downs, scarred and made taut by its jolts, chiseled fine by its jars, broadened and perfumed by the sacrifices it had called upon her for, and by the unfailing dignity and soul-loyalty, the supreme personal courage with which she never failed to make the sacrificial payment. Both the women wore time’s diadem of soft snow above their clear, clean foreheads, and God’s love in their hearts, God’s fellowship in their souls—one with the mind of a man and the heart of a woman, a woman of the world, chastened and puissant, a creature of dignity and of enormous force and charm; the other changed in little—in little that counts—from her earliest girlhood, a child still in much, as full of prejudice as she was of goodness and sweetness. Both caught now the slow music his scythe made as the Reaper garnered the human grain down by the cold, dark river. The man—an alien Chinese, far from the home he loved, was at ease here, as everywhere, but never at home, never to be at home save in the home of the wild white rose—still in his youth, ginger hot in his mouth, the cup as yet but just to his lip, his fight to come, his spurs to win, his soul girded but still very young, vowed to a cause some thought already lost—well, they too had seen their cause lost, their flag torn—never soiled—in defeat. He was seeking and striving for victory’s crown; one of them knew—for she had won and wore it—that defeat has the greater crown.

Dr. Ray was much interested to meet Sên King-lo, and to see and consider him in this easy, intimate way. She had known many Chinese—but not before a Chinese gentleman.

Almost greedy still, in her splendid, beautiful ageing, for new experiences, more and still more knowledge, she welcomed this experience and made her most of it.

Dr. Elenore Ray liked Sên King-lo. She liked his simplicity; a woman, she more than liked his deference; she liked his pleasant dignity, his unaffected repose, his good-humored reserve, and her quick, brilliant mind caught and rejoiced at the brilliance and quickness of his.

They talked more than they ate, at the well-spread and tempting table—they talked long and late on the porch afterwards.

Once Sên consulted the watch he had claimed to have lost, and turned to Dr. Ray and mentioned the hour. “May I serve you?” he asked.

“Not by seeing her home,” Julia answered. “She’s staying the night. I don’t see her so often that I let her go soon when she does come. And you need not go yet.”

But when she thought it was time for Sên King-lo to go, she said so; and he went.

“A very interesting man,” was Dr. Ray’s comment, as they heard the front door close. “I am very glad to have met him.”

“Sên King-lo called today,” Lady Snow told her husband at dinner that night. “He left regards and all that for you, Charlie, and he was perfectly sweet about the children. I think he came specially to see them—and he’s coming again. He was so disappointed that they were out. But, Ivy, he did not ask after you. I thought it so odd. Did you treat him badly the other day?”

“What day?”

“When you rode together.”

“Oh—then! No, I don’t suppose I did. For I had an exceptionally pleasant time, and I mean him to take me again.”

“Which, in my opinion, he will not, if you snub him,” Emma said sagely.

“Oh,” Ivy laughed, “I sha’n’t trouble to do that again. It isn’t worth it, and he rides too well.”

“He does most things well,” Sir Charles observed.