CHAPTER XV

The next day but one Sên sent back Miss Gilbert’s “confession-book,” and with it a boxful of lilies-of-the-valley. He sent no message, no note, not even a card. But the flowers and the book were under one cord-tied cover.

They came in the early morning, and Ivy wondered what florist’s he’d found open so early—until she glanced at her clock, and saw that it lacked little of ten. She had danced until three, and had breakfasted in bed—the children being excused from “school” today.

She heaped the lilies out on the coverlid beside her, and opened the book. How queer the Chinese writing looked! Heathenish—but picturesque—beautiful, even, she finally decided. Then she turned the leaf and read and reread the English translation. One question that he had answered in Chinese, he had left unanswered in English: “What is your favorite woman’s name?” But, of course, his favorite woman’s name was a Chinese name—and could not be translated into English. She turned back and studied the Chinese character. It was exquisitely made, she thought—almost as if the man’s hand and his brush had lingered tenderly over it. Was it a sweetheart’s name? No—it couldn’t be, for he never had so much as seen a Chinese girl—he’d said so that first night at Miss Julia’s—and it had stuck in her memory because it had struck her Western mind as at once the most absurd and the most preposterous thing she had ever heard.

She wondered what this name he most liked sounded like. She’d ask Charles to read it aloud to her. Probably Charlie didn’t pronounce Chinese with impeccable Chinese accent, but she knew that he spoke that language—or had spoken it some years ago—and no doubt he could read it a little. She’d like to hear how that funny looking little name sounded. It must be a short name—with just one character—that was what they called them, she thought—in its writing: a chubby little name, if its “character” at all depicted it—but neither unpretty nor ungraceful, for delicate curves—almost hair-lines one or two—crossed and jutted out daintily from its fat thicker sweeps of the brush. How unlike English writing this Chinese writing was! Strange that inked makeshifts for spoken words, so unlike as these that Mr. Sên had written in Chinese and those he’d written in English were, could stand for the same things, convey the same meanings! But did they? Were Chinese thoughts and English—hearts, minds, emotions—in anyway one? The man she had ridden with the other day had seemed so little un-English to her! And he had found her a little Chinese—that first night at Miss Julia’s. Could hands of the West and hands of the East meet now and then, after all, in grip not altogether Eurasian and flabby? How interesting it all was! And she’d never given it a thought before! How full of wonderful things the world was—and life!

She stretched comfortably up on her pillows, and gathered a mass of the exquisite flowers up to her face. Her soft hair lay loose about her, clouding the cambric and torchon of her pretty nightgown, perfuming her hair and her dimpled chin. Like all women who care for clothes in the nicest way, care for the sense of soft fabric on soft skin, for the beauty of texture and tint and line, for the clothes for the sake of the reflection they give of a personal daintiness and taste, and not for what they “show,” Ivy, obliged to skimp, skimped on outer garments that others saw, rather than on those that only she and her mirror ever saw, those that touched her intimately. Being young and raw she often was ashamed of coat and skirt, or of dance frock less fresh and good than were those of other girls, but she would have felt a grosser shame to put coarse, roughly-trimmed calico against her skin, which being sensible and not blind, she knew deserved its first sheath of covering to be as nearly delicate as loom and needle could contrive. It was a very pretty nightgown.

The bedclothes were both costly and beautiful. Emma Snow was house-proud. And she was too nice a woman, and too proud in the best sense, to house her husband’s girl cousin less well than she did herself. This—the girl’s own room—less crowded than Emma’s luxurious own, was not less well furnished or carefully appointed.

It was a pretty picture—the room and the girl in the bed.

She yawned happily and cuddled her lilies against her face. One spray slipped from her hand, and lay inside the lace of her gown. The morning sun came in rose through the window. And the rose in the girl’s brunette face answered it, coming and going at her musing thoughts, with the trick of rose ebb and flow that was so constant on her face, and was half its charm—rarely a blush, but always a beauty. Her soft, dark hair, all perfumed by the lilies’ sweetness, rippled over her pillows, and shadowed her throat. One hand nursed lilies-of-the-valley, and so did her cheek—one hand lay on the open confession-book, her filbert nails lying pink on a page of Chinese characters.

Ivy Gilbert was a very pretty girl—more than pretty—face and body had considerable loveliness, but her hands were her paramount beauty, as hands always are, in every race, in the woman whose loveliness is Nature’s deliberate achievement, and not just happily accidental.

Did lilies-of-the-valley grow too in China—the flowers she loved most? And their perfume was always an intoxicant to her. Did they grow in China? She’d ask Charles—or Mr. Sên. Mr. Sên who had not asked after her the day before yesterday. Why should he? How silly Emma was! “King-lo”—what a “given” name!

“Lo,” she said aloud—not very loud—and giggled softly at the sound, so much less like a man’s given name than “Tom” or “Roger” or “Rupert.” “Lo!” And yet—and yet—what about “Llewellyn” and “Silas” and “Jonas”? She knew a charming man here in Washington whose name was “Silas.” She rather thought that she’d prefer to call her brother—if she had one—“Lo” to calling him “Silas” or “Llewellyn” or “Jonas.” And “Heinrich”! Yes—she certainly’d rather own to a brother “Lo” than to a brother “Heinrich.” “Sên”—“Sên” wasn’t so bad, really it wasn’t. She thought it a far nicer name than “Watkins” or “Snider” or “Green” or “Pink” or “Higginbotham.” “Lo.” “Jo.” “Jo”—she was rather fond of “Jo”—much as she disliked “Joseph.” There were quite a lot of English names she disliked. There was not much difference between “Lo” and “Jo”—very little difference indeed. “Jo” was the nicer, of course—it sounded more masculine, and it looked so. But—after all——

She drew the book nearer, and turned a page. How well this new Chinese acquaintance—whom Charlie liked so much—wrote English. And you could read it! It was a “’varsity hand”—but perfectly legible, which so many ’varsity handwritings were not. It had all their hall-marks—the Greek e’s, the quickness and smallness, the nice absence of flourish. But it had individuality, and such courteous clearness! How English it was! It seemed almost impossible that the man who wrote it was not English. She turned back a page, and looked hard and long at the Chinese signature—giggling again at the ridiculousness it looked to her. Charlie said her giggle was like a Chinese girl’s! Well—what if it was? Probably many Chinese girls were very nice—and were charming. She liked Mr. Sên. The girls here in Washington were silly about him—and odious. But she liked him in a sensible, straightforward way—as a sensible, straightforward, and very interesting acquaintance. It seemed funny for a man to have such small and delicate hands, but when he had swung her up to her saddle she had felt his hand rock-sure and steel-strong under her foot and her weight. How beautiful her lilies were—and how sweet!

The girl and her flowers made a pretty picture, as she lounged there—even Chinese eyes must have thought so, could they have seen her all rumpled, but dainty, as she lay there in her bed, thinking thoughts she little knew, one hand holding the sweet flowers to her face—the blue eiderdown heaped with them and their long green leaves—one hand resting on a Chinese confession.

CHAPTER XVI

From then they were thrown together almost constantly—not by others, but by circumstances and social accidents. And both to her surprise and to his—more to his than to hers—their acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. It was nothing freakish, it was comradeship direct and unsilly. They met often, and knew that they liked each other, and liked to be together. They soon knew that they liked each other, but had no realization of how much. Sên King-lo suspected it first. Their divergences were a zest. And they had much in common, and that made between them a bond. Each was lonely—Ivy sometimes, King-lo almost always. Each was an alien, apart in an alien place. Each was at once homesick and homeless. Each found refreshment and tonic in the other. There were English traits and Chinese surprises in Sên, and personality that attracted her strongly. They had a score of English experiences in common. They were a boon to the homesick girl. The girl was virginal, and that attracted greatly the man of a people who cherish and reverence only one quality—maternity—more intensely than they do virginity. He knew that her friendliness had in it nothing mawkish. And in the wholesomeness of their friendship, and the wholesomeness and manliness of the man, Ivy quite forgot her first cheap desire to pique the girls who “ran after” him not too nicely. She was glad that Charles and Miss Julia valued Sên so highly, and she gave no more care or thought to what any one else thought or said of her new camaraderie. Not greatly educated, the English girl was beautifully intelligent: that attracted Sên King-lo even more than it at first surprised him. They liked and disliked many of the same things. They shared many prejudices. He was grateful to her for being beautiful, and for a hint of his own race now and then in eyes, gesture and voice. She was grateful to him for being always deferential, and often amusing, always companionable and interesting, and for his dependability to know whether Eton or Harrow had won at Lords, whether Surrey or Middlesex was at the top of the cricket average, and all about every stroke Oxford and Cambridge had made from Putney start to Mortlake finish.

The girl found the keener interest, the man stumbled into the stronger liking. But while she found no fault in him, he found a terrible fault in her, and it rankled his quickening and strengthening liking sorely; her indifference to all children, even to her own little cousins. The opal owes its loveliness and its lure to its flaw. The Chinese soul of Sên King-lo could see nothing but deformity and disease in the slightest flaw that even specked a girl’s womanliness. It grieved him that a girl who, he knew, attracted him more each time they met did not care for little children. He held it an enormity; it rankled and it bit.

Inside another month, all Washington—the “four hundred”—knew that Mr. Sên and Miss Gilbert had become—to put it nicely—“great friends.” A few were disgusted, most were amused, and not a few were jealous: Reginald Hamilton and a few dozen women.

In all the antipathetical bewildering psychology of East and West there is nothing more baffling than the lure of European women to Asiatic men. Know the East longest, search it most tirelessly, grow most in sympathy with it, and still you can see but darkly and not far into that inter-racial puzzle and secret of human nature.

The average and the typical men of the Orient are excellent husbands—polygamous?—granted. But what of their women? The “rights” the men denied their wives for centuries of centuries those wives would have resented as insult, spurned as outrage and burden. It is not facile to enfranchise a race, a caste or a sex that will have none of it. Even in Earth’s “freest” country you may coax, or lead or prod a woman to the polling-booth, but you can’t make her vote. Not yet. And in this new day of our greatest enlightenments when enfranchisement is peeping seductively over the shoulders of Oriental women, it is those women who hang back and hesitate, not their husbands and masters who hold them back or coerce them. The Oriental husband is not a tyrant. His wives rule and coerce him oftener than he does one of them. He locks them up in some places, and in some castes. They’d berate and punish him if he did not. The most ruthless ruler Afghanistan ever has had could not control or direct his favorite wife. She over-sat, she over-ate, and she over-smoked very badly indeed. Her physicians protested and warned. The Amir was thoroughly frightened, greatly distressed. He cajoled, he pleaded, he bribed with the moving bribery of pearls and jeweled tissues and thick perfumes, and it is reported that at least twice he wept. But the result was nothing. His wife laughed and pouted and scoffed and defied and calmly and obstinately lolled, ate sweetmeats, and smoked herself to obesity and death.

The Chinese man who launders undergarments and table linen or barters chop suey in Chicago or St. Louis, living in a dearth of Chinese women, marries an American wife and makes her an admirable and a generous husband. The Chinese merchant in the Straits Settlements chooses a wife from any one of a score of non-Chinese races, and they jog on together most comfortably, and he lets her rule such of their life and hours as are mutual far more than he, although in intelligence, education and principles she is his inferior, and he knows it. Chinese men of education, of some natural taste and refinement, and with ideals and sterling personal worth sometimes “take in washing” for a profession, but American women of commensurate qualities do not marry them. The Eastern man is proud of his woman, admires her and is satisfied with her and her ways. He guards and he pampers her more often than not—unless he’s a Japanese—the Parsi, the Sikh, the Chinese, the Burmese (he has to), the Cingalese, the Hindoo, yes, and the strict Mohammedan too! And every Eastern man regards the “white” races as inferior to his own, is convinced that they are, and looks down upon them. He does not find Westerners companionable, he does not find them handsome or beautiful. He dislikes their customs, abhors their dress, and despises their creeds. And he loathes their food. Why, then, the desire of the Oriental for a European (and the blonder the better) mistress or wife? It seems inexplicable. But it is. The fact remains. More than one ruler of an “independent” Indian State has married a European of rougher birth, less education, more inferior mind, uncouther manners than his own, and imperiled his throne and succession, even his life in doing it—and knowing that he did.

But in the attraction that Sên King-lo felt in this English girl there was no abnormality—unless the friendly touch of yellow and white hands is in itself abnormality. He had been educated in her country and in its ways. In much he was English. He not only could read, write and speak her language, but he could think in it—and often did. He had read more English books than she had, knew more English facts than she did—and knew far more of the deeds, the years, and the thought that have made England. And between the typical English and the typical Chinese the difference is surprisingly small—and is mostly superficial: a matter of skin-tints and of bone-formation. There is a spiritual difference—we in England have not learned to repose on Nature, to merge in her as the Chinese do, and we reverence ancestry and old age less, guard childhood less loyally, less tenderly. But England grows—as America does—in all this. And if the race of Shakespeare and Shelley and Newman lives up less to its ideals, grasps them less and less generally than does the race of Han, the ideals of the two—at best—are the same. We—Anglo-Saxons and Celts—have less vision than the Chinese and its interknit and absorbed races have, but a gleam glows in the sky of the Occident—it peeps through the blanket of our dark. We are less insular than we were—some of us at least. The Oriental lectures—than which nothing in London is more worth having—at the School of Oriental Studies in Finsbury Circus are sparsely attended, but some of us do go, and come away grateful. The East always will be East—in spite of intermittent, ape-like freaks. Probably the crasser West always will be West. But the two may meet yet, concordant parts of one splendid whole.

The attraction of the Western woman for the Eastern man in the West is a simpler and a more normal thing than her attraction of him in the East. Debarred from the womanhood of his own race in London or New York, because there are no such women there, an Oriental’s leaning towards an East-and-West marriage or intimacy has something of the humdrum quality of poor Hobson’s narrowed choice.

Sên King-lo never had seen a Chinese girl!

Ivy Gilbert’s attraction of Sên first and last was a matter of personality and of person.

Probably its next strength was a matter of caste. She seemed to him wholly and charmingly patrician. Sên King-lo—as many young Chinese have done ever since Wang-Ah Shih made an Empire and an Emperor ridiculous—believed himself to be “republican”; but he was not. He could not be. He saw in Ivy Gilbert the caste of his mothers—the ancestral women he worshiped. He saw in Ivy—a slip of English girlhood—the imperial feminine of a great, puissant, imperial people.

Republic, commonwealth, kingdom, democracy, empire—take your choice. There are things to be said of them all—they all have their points. You may not be able to choose an empire, if you’re too long about it—so they say—well, we shall see, or our children’s children will. Prophecy’s a thankless, perilous pastime. And even the writing on the wall blunders sometimes. But this much is true; our old shifting Earth has but two empires left her now—China’s and England’s. Japan doesn’t count—yet. It mixes and meddles, but in the ultimate soul bigness it does not count. And China’s a republic you say? China is not—never has been and never can be, except in the fevered dreaming of a day of midsummer madness, the demented throes of a short nightmare; there are intrinsic qualities of peoples as of individual characters which no label can change. Under another name China may not be so comfortable a place to live in, but it is an empire still, disfigured, demented, but neither shattered nor lost—but not less than empire while the soul of the Sages, whom she wombed and who too begat her, breathes through the soul of her people, the poppies and bamboos hang at the edge of the Yellow Sorrow, and the silkworms gorge on the mulberry leaves and empurple the looms. And while those twin empires stand—in so much alike, so much unalike—a something will show in many faces of two races’ women which shows in no others. It is not distinction—though it often includes it; it is not courage—though it never lacks it; it is not flare or flame; it is not beauty; though never unfeminine it is not femininity; it is not dignity, though it never is cheap, it never asserts itself—it has no need to; it is not self-conscious; it is neither humble nor proud and yet it is both; it is neither virtue nor individuality; still less is it cant; it is empire—racial empire and personal empire: a part and a whole. A thing to admire? That’s as you think. But while the wild white rose perfumes the graves of Li’s ancestors, and the Augean goats browse by the graves of English boys in Gallipoli, that something will show in the faces of one type—the best type—of Chinese and English women. Ts’z-hi had it, and Ivy Gilbert, whatever medley her ancestry, undeniably had it, and the eyes of a Chinese man, who had been a sash-wearer for thousands of years, saw it and gloated. She wore it here in Washington; in the nursery schoolroom, in the ballroom or at Rosehill, as Ts’z-hi had worn it in the Vermilion Palace.

That Sên King-lo was attracted by Ivy Gilbert was not odd. That he attracted her, would be longer to explain, if one could—more intricate and difficult to trace. But he did. And her liking and friendliness turned to him in the good old hackneyed way that sunflowers have turned to the sun ever since Adam made the meanest and truest excuse in human history.

She tempted him—though he didn’t know it yet.

Youth called to youth. Loneliness answered to loneliness. Sex called to sex.

CHAPTER XVII

Emma Snow took alarm first.

“Do you want Ivy to marry Sên King-lo?” she suddenly asked her husband one morning.

“Damn! Hell!” the phlegmatic Englishman cried hotly. He was shaving, and he’d cut himself rather badly. (He had a dressing-room of his own, and used it but rarely.) He sopped off the blood as well as he could, then flung about on his wife more angry and ruder than she ever had seen him.

“Don’t be disgusting!” he snapped.

“I see what I see,” she retorted smoothly.

“I decline to listen to preposterous, lying, nauseating vulgarity,” Snow growled, his mouth twitching angrily. “Such a hideous idea never entered, or could, any head but yours.”

“I see what I see,” she repeated good-humoredly. She was sorry for Charlie.

“Blow what you see!” Rage, and perhaps a subconscious sick fear, obsessed him, made him forget himself in their torturing grip.

“Use your eyes!” his wife advised him more coldly. And, not unjustly incensed, she finished her own toilet in silence, and went down to the breakfast-room without a glance or a word more.

Dr. Ray saw it next.

The physician was still in Washington. Independent now of her large Chicago practice, she took more and more time each year for the travel and study she loved; and few years passed in which she did not make at least one stay of weeks, if not months, in Washington.

“Do you want pretty Miss Gilbert to marry Sên King-lo?” she asked Miss Julia as they sat one morning at breakfast.

Miss Julia was furious. Her old hands trembled so that she dropped the cup she was lifting. It had been in the Townsends’ possession only goodness and the gods of the South knew how long; and she didn’t give it a look as it crashed in fragments on the floor, nor a glance to the pools of hot coffee staining the breakfast damask and her crisp morning-gown. She didn’t say “Damn,” and she didn’t say “Hell”; but for all that, she answered her friend very much as Sir Charles Snow had answered his wife.

The physician took it in perfect good part. But she stood her ground.

“I can’t help thinking that this is just what it is shaping towards, Julia.”

“You are horrible,” Miss Townsend moaned sickly. “It couldn’t be.”

“Why not?” Dr. Ray demanded gently.

Julia Townsend shrank back in her chair—speechless. She could not have been more surprised, dismayed, disappointed if Jefferson Davis had proved a traitor or Robert E. Lee disgraced his uniform—not half so much so if Mexico’s gulf had submerged her beloved South. She felt soiled by the tongue of a friend.

“Why not?” Dr. Ray insinuated.

“Why not! Because the bare suggestion is abominable,” Miss Julia exclaimed. “I’d kill Sên King-lo if I believed that he even could harbor the vile thought—which I know he could not.”

“I do not believe that he has thought of it yet,” Dr. Ray said, helping herself to the omelette Miss Julia made no motion to offer. “I am sure they have not thought of it yet—either of them. People usually marry first, and think after, I’ve noticed. And I believe they will do it—marry each other.”

Miss Julia, with a thin old hand that shook violently under its burden of gems, pushed a silver dish of fast-cooling sweetbreads farther afield, as if she feared the other might take food she’d grudge her. She did it automatically.

“They might do worse—perhaps,” the guest said musingly. “But I know you wouldn’t like it.”

“My God!” Julia Townsend moaned. “And you—you a Southern woman! A Southern woman—and my friend! You used to be my friend!”

“I do not like it either,” Dr. Ray said quietly—too true a physician to be incensed at nerves. “But, Julia, the world moves. We can’t shut our eyes to that. At least, I can’t.”

Poor Miss Julia shuddered, a green shadow lay on her trembling mouth. She was nauseated, soul and body. But the physician went on, “cruel to be kind,” as such physicians do:

“I know a very nice girl in Chicago who has married a Chinaman—several years ago it was. They are perfectly happy. He is kind and generous to her. He has a sort of delicatessen shop and curio shop mixed—food on one side, dishes and vases and Joss-sticks and Jacob’s-ladders on the other. He works from dawn to dusk, and must be worth a good deal by this—but he never lets her do a hand’s turn, and her silks and furs and rings—good rings—are a scandal. And their baby——”

“Hush!” Miss Julia ordered in a terrible voice. Her eyes were ablaze.

“But they both are peasants—at least she certainly is—and I often have wondered how such a marriage would result between husband and wife, both of gentle birth. It would be very interesting——”

But Julia Townsend could bear no more. She covered her face in her coffee-sodden napkin and broke into sobs.

Elenore Ray shook her head sadly. If Julia took the uncorroborated hint like this, how would she take the accomplished fact—if it eventuated?

Emma Snow had warned Sir Charles; Dr. Ray had warned Miss Julia. Except that each had angered and disgusted, neither had made the slightest impression.

Sên King-lo came and went at the Massachusetts Avenue house and at Rosehill as before, and both Snow and Miss Julia scorned to notice how, or how often, he and Ivy spoke to each other. Dr. Ray held her peace and so did Lady Snow.

But that was more than Washington did. Would it be a match? Men made bets at the clubs, and women “Oh”-ed and “Ah”-ed and “My dear”-ed over tea-cups and cocktails—in Turkish Baths, and even in whispers at church. Had Sên King-lo been caught at last? Was he going to marry Ivy Gilbert? What did the Chinese Minister think about it?

That, the Chinese Minister did not state.

Washington is a gossipy place—it gossips in many languages, and from several angles. There is even more talk in Washington than there is in Simla. But Washington rarely had a more diverting theme than this. “Ivy Gilbert and Sên King-lo” were on every tongue. But, oddly enough, not a word of it had reached either. No thought of marriage, not even of “love,” had occurred most remotely to the Chinese man or to the English girl.

But she wore his perfumed lily-bells now—and they came more and more often. And Emma Snow knew what the florist himself could have told her, if she had not, that to no other woman, not even to Miss Julia, did Sên King-lo ever send lilies-of-the-valley. And the florist could have confirmed Lady Snow’s belief that to no other girl did Sên King-lo ever send a flower. But the florist kept lips as close as the Chinese Minister’s own. But while others guessed and wondered, the florist had not the slightest doubt of how it would end.

The friendship begun by a common aversion to kissing, a jade-green frock, and a bunch of dangling crimson peppers grew—and more than once it pulsed.

CHAPTER XVIII

Emmeline Hamilton lay on a pile of cushions heaped on the floor, one hand under her head, her knees hunched up in what she thought a Chinese attitude, a cigarette she tried to imagine was opium in her mouth, a purple kimono, embroidered with blue chrysanthemums and red and gold dragons and beetles and smaller bugs, flopped loosely about her. She flattered the garment that it was ultra-Chinese, but it was merely an atrocious libel on the women of Japan. It revealed an appalling stretch of her amazingly thin legs and not only all her neck, but much that lies below necks. But that was less exposure than it sounds—for Emmeline was built as chastely flat as her mother: except for her nose and ears there scarcely was a jut on Emmeline. She caved in here and there thinly, but she nowhere bulged. A Chinese woman, even one whose profession was frailty, would sooner have strangled or starved herself or have perished by slow suffering inches than have exposed any part of her neck. But Emmeline didn’t know that. Her mawkish but intense and tigerish infatuation for Sên King-lo was no greater than her ignorance of his people and their customs. Her furniture, which had cost enough to be good, was a poor imitation of inlaid teak-wood. The room was thick and sneeze-provoking with the smoke of joss-sticks that by chance were Chinese, which the prints and kakemonos on the walls were not, but the prints were good of their sort, and the costumes they showed were the garb of an older China—for Japan took her dress, as she’s taken most she has that is best—from China centuries ago. The great gong that stood conspicuously and inconveniently in the middle of the room hailed from the Tottenham Court Road and had been made not far from that street of “Horse-Shoe” and furniture for cash or time-payment. A porcelain bowl of sweet-meats lay on the floor beside her, a pair of chop-sticks she simply could not learn to manipulate crossed above the chocolates and glacé fruits. She wore an oleander flower over one ear and a tiny orange-colored fan over the other. She was well hung with jade—such as it was—and the foot from which she had kicked its heelless sandal showed that she wore white stockings made like mittens, with separate compartments provided for flat great toes.

She had taken her flat for a year; and had furnished it, as she believed (and said), in an absolutely Chinese way. And she lived here alone with a maid old enough to be a duenna—but far too shrewd to attempt it.

Her brother sulked on a very uncomfortable stool—too high for feet—very much too low for one’s legs to be conveniently or painlessly disposed of. Emmeline had been crying; her eyes were redder than her lightly rouged cheeks. Reginald looked thunderous. Each had close at hand a cocktail—larger than cocktails usually are made. The Reginald’s—he liked to be called so—was served in a champagne glass; Emmeline’s in a small bowl which she called a Chinese wine cup—but Li Po himself never drank wine out of any vessel half so ample, for it was almost as large as a small afternoon tea-cup.

“I tell you it’s true!” the girl sobbed, between a whiff and a sip.

“I’ll not believe it!” Reginald liked the suggestion almost as little as Miss Julia had—and by it his personal vanity was stung, which Miss Julia Townsend’s had not been. “That low Chink——”

Emmeline threw out a dramatic hand, scattering ash into the embossed scales of the purple kimono’s handsomest dragon. “Not here!” she hissed. “No one that speaks with less than the deepest respect for Sên King-lo shall dare speak it here. He is Celestial!” and she sank back with an adoring moan on her prickly cushions—a stork’s leg rasped her cheek—but she was too highly or abjectly Chinese to wince.

“Rot!” Reginald replied.

He turned to his cocktail; she pulled broken-heartedly at her cigarette. She had a pretty collection of tiny pipes—Chinese and otherwise—but, like the chop-sticks, they had mastered her, not she them. She industriously kept them conspicuous, but she couldn’t manage to use them.

“Reggie,” she said presently, “can’t we help each other, you and I? Let’s.”

“How?” He spoke gloomily.

“We must think.”

Reginald acquiesced—if he did—by discreet silence, and waited for his sister to do the thinking; a process more in her line than in his—as they both knew, though Reginald rarely referred to the fact. He had but two gifts, beauty of person and splendor of raiment. Emmeline Hamilton was versatile and not without brains. Her silliness was a pose—his a reality and an emptiness. She affected asceticism and languor. He affected nothing but his surprising English accent. Even it he found no small strain and fatigue. If she had been born a boy, she might have attained to as successful and profitable a mountebankry as their father’s. Success, except in an almost floral display of haberdashery, was not for Reginald de Courcy Hamilton.

“You want to marry her?”

“Yep.” He rarely wasted his English en famille.

“You are determined? Perfectly? She hasn’t a cent.”

“I’m nothing of the sort. She won’t have me.”

“You’ve asked her?”

He nodded. No use not giving her the whole lay of the land, if she was to work her wits on it to advantage. But he wasn’t going to dwell on that part of it.

“When?”

“What’s that to do with it?”

“Probably everything. You answer; I’ll do the asking. When?”

“Plenty of times,” he muttered viciously.

“Since she’s seen so much of Sên King-lo?”

“Sên King-lo be blowed! I tell you he has nothing to do with it.”

“I tell you he has. Did you propose, the first time, since the last Rosehill garden party? It was there they met. Mary Withrow told me so. Was it after that that you proposed to Ivy Gilbert the first time?”

Reginald growled and nodded. His vanity was writhing. But as far as it was in him to care for any one but himself, he cared for Ivy Gilbert—and cared for her somewhat surprisingly for one of his type and of his selfishness, since he wished to marry a penniless girl—which was precisely what he always had purposed never to do. He wanted Ivy. And, if Emmeline could help him to it, she’d have to have questions answered. He saw that.

Emmeline lit a fresh cigarette and lay with her pale eyes darkly fixed on the ceiling—hatching her plan.

“I have it! We must make him believe that she has jilted you.”

“Thank you!” Gratitude could not have sounded more thankless.

“If she could be made to believe that I was engaged to him, or had been——”

“Look here, Em,” her brother broke in hotly, “I won’t listen to such disgusting rot. You engaged, even in fun, to a Chink! Don’t you dare say such a thing again, even to me!”

Emmeline laughed thinly. There was little she did not dare do—Reg was the weaker vessel, quite without influence on the sister who, under a trailing, floppy affectation of languor, was an intensely vital young woman; and they both knew it. Their parents both consulted Emmeline frequently and usually followed her advice when they sought it. More than once she had had a strong finger in a sermon-pie of her father’s.

“If I were engaged to Sên King-lo it wouldn’t be in fun,” she remarked with a hungry sigh.

“Stop it, I tell you!”

Miss Hamilton paid no attention to her brother’s rising wrath—a nearer manliness than he often reached—and very little and cool attention to his words.

“I’d bring a breach-of-promise suit against him,” she went on, “if I had one iota to go on. But I haven’t. I haven’t a scratch of his pen. I’ve written him notes about all sorts of things, but he telephoned the skimpiest, formal answers—and rung off before I could get in three words. Sên King-lo has never danced with me,” her words trailed off in a smothered wail.

Reginald Hamilton was too disgusted to speak. He stood up roughly and turned towards the door.

Emmeline rolled over on her big prickly cushions, face down on them, but head held up, chin on folded arms; and she fixed her brother with an imperious look from light, narrowed eyes.

“Sit down,” she commanded. “I’ve got it! Sit down.”

But for once Reginald Hamilton faced his manlier sister squarely. “I won’t have you mixed up in it, Em. Anything else you like—but not your name mixed up with that Chink’s.”

Perhaps Emmeline recognized the affection that lay in his brotherly rage; for she said with another but not ill-natured sigh. “That’s all right, old bean. It wouldn’t work; so it isn’t our game. But, I’ve got it! Sit down.”

Reginald sat down.

CHAPTER XIX

An ominous silence reigned in the schoolroom, and Ivy—just home from a fashionable wedding at St. Aloysius—looked cautiously in, to see what mischief the children were doing.

Sên King-lo sat on the floor, Blanche standing behind him, her chubby arms pinion-tight about his neck, her small fat hands clutched on his face. Dick sprawled at his knees, one of Dick’s feet beating an ecstatic tattoo on the man’s suffering trousers, not to mention the possible pain to Sên’s leg. All three were beaming with happiness. An array of toys, such as Ivy never had seen, strewed the floor, and Sên King-lo was making a procession of them as well as he could, pinioned and manacled by the excited youngsters: grotesque Chinese toys—animals that must have startled Darwin and Hudson—and a gorgeous sprinkling of dolls. The little clay animals bore a remarkable family resemblance, all were bright orange, handsomely embellished with generous circles of black, and the dragon looked as much like a tiger as it did like a dragon, the tiger as much like a dragon as it did like a tiger, the peacock—an orange and jet-black peacock—the cormorant and the duck looked triplets, the lion and ape and horse were fulsomely flattering imitations of each other. There were several imitation dwarf-trees, an ivory pagoda, a coolie-manned junk, a mandarin under his best umbrella, a toy-theater, all its actors complete, a peasant’s mat hut, a buffalo working a water-wheel, a party of pig-tailed merchants playing dice, and drinking samshu, a lady with very small feet and a very large simper, quite a créche of babies—one on its amah’s back—a monk and a be-fanned and parasoled warrior, a litter of picture-books, and a number of other playthings to which the astonished governess could fit no names.

The three on the floor looked up as Miss Gilbert stood in the door, and the two children frowned at the interruption. Sên rose with a smile, Blanche pendant on his back, strangling his neck, Dick clutched on one arm, a gigantic top in Sên’s left hand. He held out his other hand to Miss Gilbert.

But she drew back a little. “Not with that menagerie at close quarters,” she laughed. “I know what those two do to best dresses. Get down, children, get down at once. Mr. Sên is not a pony.”

But the children stayed where they were, clinging to Sên King-lo but the tighter.

“Me love ’im, and ’im love me,” Blanche announced.

“See what topping things he’s brought us—from Pekin!” Dick bade his cousin.

Ivy raised her eyebrows at Sên King-lo. “You made a quick journey to Pekin and back, Mr. Sên,” she said.

“Yes, didn’t I? A record journey. I promised these imps some real Chinese toys—weeks ago—and I wired a friend to send them to me. They came this morning. Do come and play with us. We are having a splendid time.”

“Do you really enjoy it?” the girl asked incredulously.

“I love it,” Sên told her.

Ivy shook her head sadly. “I don’t understand you.” And her eyes were cold and unfriendly, Sên thought. But he tried once more. “Won’t you?” he asked with an effort. The zest had gone out of his voice, and its tone was flat and perfunctory.

“Sit on the floor, and pretend I’m three? No, thank you. Whatever are those?” she demanded—disapprovingly, Sên thought.

“Chinese kites,” he told her dully.

Almost a dozen were stacked in one corner—balloon-shaped bodies with bat-shaped wings.

“Practising for next Easter?” she queried a little superciliously. “Where are your eggs?”

“Oh—we’ll get the eggs; dozens and dozens of eggs,” Sên assured her.

Blanche gave a gurgle of delight and assaulted Sên’s ear with a damp rosebud kiss. Ivy saw him wince.

“It’s your own fault,” she told him. “Well, I’m off.”

“Tum back to tea,” Blanche said generously.

“Yes, cousin Ive—you must,” Dick added. “Mr. Sên is having his with us.”

“You’ll have to excuse me, Dick,” Ivy refused. “Mr. Sên will pour beautifully, I’m sure.”

“Dere’s doin’ to be muffens,” Blanche announced proudly.

But Ivy stood firm. “Not even for crumpets! Ba. You are a hero, Mr. Sên.” And she left them.

Sên bowed gravely and returned to the floor, and as she crossed the hall she heard the great top spin.

The children squealed with delight, but Sên King-lo smothered a sigh.

How desirable she’d looked there in the doorway—though even in his mind he did not consciously word it like that—the girl in her silvery steel-trimmed gown, violets at her breast, and in the picture hat that shaded her brunette face and was tied with violet ribbons under her dimpled, mutinous chin. He had never desired her more—and never had he desired her less—though it never yet had occurred to him that he, intensely Chinese, desired her at all: the girl who had no affection for children, no share in their fresh little pleasures, no tenderness for the baby-lives that were of her own near kindred.

And Emma Snow, who noticed most things, and chattered and laughed over many, noticed—and said nothing about it—that for many days Sên King-lo sent no lilies-of-the-valley to Ivy.

CHAPTER XX

Emmeline Hamilton was silly—decadent even but she was far from stupid. She made her move at once now, but she made it deftly and unbiased or hampered by anything that Reginald had said or that he felt.

Rumor began to scratch and tear at Sên King-lo, and it did not leave Ivy Gilbert quite unscotched—though, for a time, it left her unsmirched.

It was winter now, and November winds rattled leafless branches at Arlington and on the hillside woods above old Fort Totten’s star-shaped embankments and cherished parapets. The Potomac crawled gray and sullen between ice-scummed shores. If gossip and scandal are rampant in the capital’s summer-time, in winter they flourish like upas trees and leap to maturity and detail like the Indian conjurer’s mango tree. Gossip likes the fireside glow, and scandal’s a greedy drinker of afternoon tea—likes its feet on the fender, and congenial cronies with light heads and easy chairs close drawn.

Sên King-lo was a roué. There was a Chinese girl close-kept in a high-up flat over a laundry, its front curtains never open night or day—and there were others! He was the real proprietor of a select gambling-place. He trafficked in opium—oh dear, yes. He got tipsy at the Club—no one knew where he got the stuff, but he did. It had been hushed up—though it wouldn’t have been for an American citizen—but when it came to a heathen Chinaman! He had tried to marry Miss Hamilton, but she wouldn’t look at him. The Snows ought to be more careful of their young cousin, really they should. Of course, Sir Charles was a busy man. But Lady Snow, one might think, might see what was up. Marry Ivy Gilbert? Of course not. There were other endings than that to such affairs, more lurid endings, my dear. They were together half the time now, and at all hours. They went off together on horseback, miles and miles. A groom behind them—an English groom? Oh dear, no—not always. And what if he was? The tea-cups clacked on their saucers, and the tongues clacked too—not all of them feminine tongues. Who had passed that counterfeit bill at the Metropolitan Club? Why was it hushed up? Who had hushed it, and how? Sên King-lo cheated at cards. But, dear old bean, all Chinamen did that. Early in December the Chinese girl who lived in the close-curtained flat over the laundry—no one seemed too sure quite where—died. No doctor—no anything. The poor thing’s body was taken out in the dead of night. All bumpty-bump in a box down the laundry back stairs. Scandalous! Taken across the river in a rowboat. What were the police about? And buried, or disposed of somehow—somewhere—goodness only knows where! Isn’t it horrible? And that very same night Sên King-lo had gone to the ball at General Howard’s—the Howards of all people—who thought half the nicest people in Washington not good enough to know their girls—and Lady Egerton had danced with him—and so had Lucy Howard—and he’d danced with Lady Snow, and he had danced twice with the Gilbert girl. There could be only one end to it! Of course!

The rumors trickled, then swelled, and no one knew—or cared—who was their source. And Sên King-lo was more talked of than ever and not run after any the less. And Ivy was cold-shouldered a little—when Lady Snow was not looking. You couldn’t slight Lady Snow’s cousin when Lady Snow was looking.

Every one heard it all—every one but Lady Snow herself and Ivy and Sên King-lo. Lady Snow heard none of it. Ivy heard a good deal, but none of the gossip that linked her name with Sên’s. All that was worst of it reached Sên King-lo, but only the slightest whisper of what was said of his acquaintance with Miss Gilbert.

Sên took no notice—except that he watched the English girl’s face with speculative, careful eyes.

Their acquaintance still waxed—though still in his mind a flaw lingered and rankled: Ivy’s unwomanly dislike of children.

Dr. Ray heard the unclean talk at her hotel and in several drawing-rooms; heard it and invited Mr. Sên to dinner. Miss Townsend heard it in her Rosehill fastness and crossed the purveyor off her visiting list—and, after doing that two or three times, heard it no more. Sir Charles Snow heard it all and urged Sên King-lo the oftener to his board and encouraged him even more cordially to Blanche and Dick’s nursery. Toys were costing Sên King-lo almost as much now as lilies-of-the-valley in December were. Snow and Sên never spoke to each other of the crawling gossip. But each knew that the other knew that they both knew; and they smiled into each other’s eyes now and then—but no plainer allusion passed between them, and Sên King-lo accepted Charles Snow’s loyalty and faith as a matter of course, and quite simply.

The Chinese Minister heard of all that was said. It was he that told Sên; no other man could have dared—unless Snow had cared to or thought it worth while. The Chinese Minister told it in all its ugly grimness—but did not speak of Miss Gilbert—but his old eyes danced and his sides shook with mirth.

Sên heard him gravely and made no comment beyond a cold smile and a slight indifferent gesture.

As for Ivy she showed Mr. Sên a warmer, franker friendliness than she had before; and Sên understood and was grateful and was only able to refrain from telling her so because it was impossible to speak of such things to a girl.

Then Emmeline Hamilton reloaded her dice and threw them again. She did it twice.

A morning paper—not one of the best reputed—announced the engagement of Sên King-lo and Miss Hamilton. No names were mentioned, but the descriptions of “a prominent Chicago clergyman’s daughter and a socially conspicuous young Chinese diplomat” were too well and accurately done to be mistakable.

Washington tittered. And the Chinese Minister’s sides shook again.

So Sên King-lo had been playing with Miss Gilbert all the time—and Emmeline Hamilton had won! For she herself had advertised her infatuation too vividly and widely for any one at all au fait with the capital’s social swimmers not to know of it—no matter what they had said a month ago. That was how most of the breakfast tables summed it up. But a handful of other individuals did not accept the situation so. Dr. Ray smiled sagely when her attention was called to the paragraph—the journal was not one which she herself read—and then the physician’s face grew grave.

“Poor girl,” she said to herself—not referring to Ivy. The erudite Latin of an uncomfortable malady had crossed her thought. And she had heard Joseph Hamilton preach—once. She had not called it “preach”; she had called it “perform.”

Sên King-lo—like all of his race, always an early riser—chanced in at the Club soon after breakfast, picked up the first sheet he saw, and caught, not his own name but the clearly pointed lines. It was not a journal taken in at the Chinese Legation.

Sên too smiled, even more coldly than Dr. Ray had, purloined the page and went leisurely off towards Judiciary Square, and, his business there done, walked a little more briskly to Massachusetts Avenue. He asked neither for Lady Snow nor for Sir Charles, but for Miss Gilbert.

Would she ride? he asked, when she came down.

She shook her head. “I wish I could. But it’s the verb ‘to be’ and the boundaries of the Sea of Marmora for me today.”

“Turn them over, lock, stock and barrel—verb, sea, children and all—to Justine. It’s a perfect day, and I very much wish you’d come,” he urged.

“It is a tempting day,” Ivy owned.

“Do come.”

“Oh—well,” she yielded, “they learn as much when I don’t teach them as when I do; and Justine shall hear them slaughter the verb ‘to be’ in French. Marmora can wait a day.”

“It will wait, on all its four boundaries, for many a day, if I’m any judge of Dick and Ba,” Sên asserted.

Ivy nodded and laughed. “Ring and order Wolf then, while I put on my habit, will you?”

“Thank you,” Sên told her, as he opened the door.

Usually Sên King-lo asked her where they should ride, but today he took the way. And Ivy wondered why he chose the streets he did, keeping some time to the residential streets and circles before he turned towards the country.

“What are we doing, Mr. Sên?” she demanded, as they passed by the Sheridan house for the second time. “And why are we walking? Are you trying to see some one?”

“No one, whom I do not see,” he answered lightly. “But one likes to be seen sometimes.”

“You are going up and down the same streets,” she grumbled.

“I am taking a short cut,” Sên told her gravely. And then he laughed.

But after that the girl got her canter, and they lunched with Miss Julia—Dr. Ray chanced to be lunching also—and rode back in the crisp of the early sunset.

They had no groom with them today, as now they sometimes did not.

Miss Townsend scarcely approved of that—but she made no remark. It was Lady Snow’s business, not hers. And Miss Julia was no poacher.

The two women stood at the door to see them go, and Elenore Ray noticed that they were unattended—and smiled. Girls often rode so in Chicago. But that was not why the Chicago physician smiled.

And she had smiled too at lunch, when Ivy had twitted Sên upon the slow passing and repassing up and down the Washington streets he’d inflicted upon them before he’d let them take the long over-river roads for which she and their horses had longed. And again she demanded why.

But Sên King-lo only had laughed.