CHAPTER XXI

Abraham Kelly was as shrewd and polished as he was hard: a lawyer such as only New England can produce. He liked the Chinese Minister, and his Chinese Excellency liked and trusted Kelly.

Miss Hamilton never had met him, but she knew of him—every one did, for he was a national asset—and she knew him by sight; for the stern and upright old man was an inveterate theater-goer, and rarely missed a first night, sitting through tragedy and comedy with equal grimness, and insisting, at the fall of every curtain, that there never had been and never would be but one playhouse of merit: the Boston Museum—never an artist to compare with Annie Clarke and Baron and Warren and Mrs. Vincent, and never a play to equal “The Angel of Midnight.”

Emmeline was puzzled when his card was brought to her, but after a moment she said, “Yes—I’ll see him.”

Perhaps Uncle Silas had died and had left her most of his money—most sensible of him, if he had, for she’d make better use of it than ever Reg would. Perhaps Uncle Silas had, and Mr. Kelly had come to tell her of her legacy. She’d wear deep mourning for her uncle, of course, if he’d left her a lot—half or more. She loved white, and white was Chinese mourning she knew. For, if Miss Hamilton knew less than nothing of China, it was not because she had not read feverishly a large number of books telling of that country and its people.

But surely her father or mother would have telegraphed, if old Uncle Silas was dead. No—she was afraid it couldn’t be that. Well, she’d said he could come up—and she might as well see him, no matter what it was.

She went to the window and arranged herself there in an Oriental languorous attitude.

She thought that the light from the window and the background of purple, dragon-embroidered curtains, with a candle-lantern of jangling glass beads hanging between them, suited her well.

And Emmeline was looking her best today. Excitement was tinging her thin face with almost a girlish and pretty rose, and her pale eyes were sparkling. She was hoping so much from the paragraph in the paper of which several copies—blue penciled—lay about the room conspicuously. The paragraph was in just as she’d wished. And out of one copy of the paper she’d cut it, and she was wearing it now in the jade locket over her heart! She was hoping everything from Sên King-lo’s chivalry! The Chinese were so chivalrous—all the best authorities said so, and a man who had spent a week in Shanghai had told her once that it was perfectly true, and even a Presbyterian missionary friend of her father’s to whom she had repeated it had made no reply.

At the sound of hoofs she turned her face to the window, to see, who was riding by; she didn’t ride herself, she thought it too mannish, and she didn’t enjoy it—but she always liked to watch men who rode. And though she never yet had seen him pass her window, there was always a chance that it might be. . . .

It was. And a bitter look rushed into her eyes. For Sên King-lo was speaking to Ivy Gilbert, and Ivy was laughing back at him—neither paying any undue attention to the horses they rode.

Emmeline watched them out of sight—neither looked up at her window—and she turned back with a paler face as Kelly came into the room. He bowed, and then he coughed. The clouds of smoke from the many clustering joss-sticks had smote him, throat and nose.

Emmeline motioned to him languorously. “Pray be seated, Mr. Kelly.”

The lawyer threw a searching glance across the remarkable room and bowed his thanks. The inlaid stool did not attract him, and there was nothing else to sit on—if it was intended for seating purposes. That the cushions on the floor were so intended did not cross his mind—a shrewd and versatile mind, but adamantly New-Englandish.

“I shall detain you but a moment, Madam,” he said, still standing. “My client, Mr. Sên King-lo——”

“Oh, but you must sit down.” Emmeline rushed at him, and caught his arm in almost caressing fingers.

Abraham Kelly bowed and backed and extracted his broadcloth dexterously.

“Mr. Sên King-lo has seen with great distress and grave indignation the paragraph which you, I observe, also have seen.” He pointed a lean fore-finger at the blue-marked sheet on the nearest cocktail table. “He has instructed me to express to you his deepest concern that you, a lady whom he scarcely knows, should have been libeled so scurrilously in the intolerable journalistic falsehood.” Emmeline sighed sentimentally. “The base and unfounded insinuation will be withdrawn, contradicted and apologized for in tomorrow’s issue. I already have seen the editor and the proprietor and myself dictated the contradiction and the apology. But my client wishes me to express to you his indignation and regret. If we can find the original culprit, I am instructed to push the case to the severest limit our laws provide, unless—unless you, Madam, would prefer, for obvious reasons, that the matter be dropped and we all rest satisfied with the withdrawal and apology. It is for you to decide.”

“I should like to see Mr. Sên himself about it first,” Emmeline said sentimentally.

“That I fear will be impossible now,” the lawyer replied regretfully. “Having put the matter in my hands, my client cannot speak on the matter except through me. We lawyers are sticklers, you know, and the Chinese are punctilious—and none more so than Mr. Sên King-lo.”

“Nonsense!” Emmeline snapped. “I insist upon seeing Mr. Sên about it.”

“Impossible,” the lawyer told her tersely.

“I shall write to him,” Miss Hamilton insisted sulkily. “Mr. Sên himself and I will decide what we are going to do about it. I had a right to be consulted before you went to the paper—not after. It’s as much my affair as Mr. Sên’s. And I don’t propose to be left out of it. I shall telephone the newspaper at once.”

Kelly bowed.

“And I shall write to King-lo,” she repeated hysterically.

“And he will hand your note to me to answer,” the lawyer told her smoothly.

“Show a woman’s letter—her personal letter—to you! He couldn’t!”

“Pardon me; he would have to. And I have seen many women’s personal letters.” He smiled a little.

“I shall mark it ‘Private,’ ” the girl almost hissed.

The lawyer bowed. But hard as he was—all buckram and broadcloth and relentless procedure—he was sorry for the unstrung pallid creature facing him. He had diagnosed her as Dr. Ray had—as quickly and convincedly. Lawyers see as much, perhaps, of that complex as physicians do—even in New England.

“You will let me know—when you have considered it—your decision as to whether we are to ferret out, as we undoubtedly can, the originator of the false and abominable falsehood, or to let that part of it drop. Our only wish is to spare you further annoyance.”

“I’ll let Mr. Sên know,” Miss Hamilton answered haughtily. “You are not my lawyer. I’ll choose my own lawyer, if I want one.”

Kelly bowed.

“I insist—” she began hotly; but Abraham Kelly had bowed himself out.

Emmeline stood for several moments where he’d left her, limp with rage, her thin breast heaving painfully, her clenched hands raised above her head.

As his footsteps died away, she threw herself face downwards on her cushions, and broke into hard, tearless sobs, her nervous fingers picking convulsively at the pillows’ silks and tinsels.

Sên King-lo’s chivalry had failed her. And he was riding with Ivy Gilbert!

But she scorned her defeat. She was not through yet, and she’d throw her dice again.

CHAPTER XXII

Ivy Gilbert heard of the paragraph of course; every one did. She heard of it that evening, but she gave it even less thought than Sir Charles did; for he wondered idly who had inspired it and why, but Ivy did not even do that. She heard of it, but she did not trouble to read it, and Emma, watching, wondered if she’d been mistaken in believing that Ivy had come to take more than a friendly interest in Mr. Sên. If she did, she gave no sign now.

Of the ugly stories that were clouding Sên’s name more persistently every day, no word ever had been spoken by Lady Snow as yet. Emma Snow had no wish to mention them to her cousin, and had she wished, which she did not, to speak of them to Sir Charles, would not have dared do it.

A few days after the morning journal had eaten its yesterday’s words, Lady Snow’s drawing-room was very full even for her “at home” day.

Emmeline Hamilton came very early, and finding a moment and a corner alone with Ivy, said suddenly, “Do you care for King-lo?”

Ivy stiffened. “Do I what, Miss Hamilton?”

“You know that my brother cares for you.”

“We will not discuss that,” Ivy cut her short.

“And Sên King-lo is all the world to me.”

“Oh—hush,” Ivy cried, ashamed to her core that any girl could be so brazen—for such she considered the other’s avowal of feeling for a man with whom, as Ivy knew, her acquaintance was very slight. It did not shock her at all that Miss Hamilton had come to care for a Chinese—for she, Ivy herself, had ceased to think of Sên King-lo as of a race apart and debarred and even unconsciously thought of him as of one far less alien to her than most of the men she met here.

“He is,” Emmeline went desperately on, “and I don’t care who knows it——”

“That is evident,” Ivy Gilbert thought. But she said nothing.

“—and he’d have been engaged to me now, if it wasn’t for you.”

“That is preposterous,” Ivy interrupted indignantly.

“It is preposterous,” Emmeline agreed quickly; “for he does not care for you really, and I don’t believe that you care for him. If you do care for him, say so—” Ivy’s lip curled—“and then it will be a fair fight between you and me. But, if you don’t, won’t you give him back to me? I want him. Do you?”

“I think you must be mad, and I know you are disgusting,” Ivy rather panted, looking at Emmeline with horror-widened eyes, and moving to go.

But Emmeline caught at her wrist with vise-like thin fingers; and short of making a scene in Emma’s drawing-room, where already a few other guests were trickling in, there was no escape. So she sat down again. You must humor lunatics; she had always heard that. Well—she hoped she’d not meet another lunatic soon.

“Answer me! You shall! Do you care for King-lo?”

“I like Mr. Sên—as I think every one does,” Ivy said coldly.

“Only that?”

Ivy bent her head, with a look of contempt straight into Emmeline’s eyes.

“Oh—he is perfect!” Emmeline bleated. “Will you give him back to me?”

“I cannot give what is not mine. And I will not listen to any more insult—not if I have to appeal to my cousin.”

“Is he coming here today?” Emmeline pleaded abjectly, a sudden change in tone and manner. Dr. Ray would have read it apprehensively; but Ivy was merely blankly amazed.

“I do not know,” she answered truthfully.

“Did he give you those flowers you are wearing?”

But that was too much—scene or no scene. Miss Gilbert rose again, and this time the other made no attempt to stay her but called after her, “I know he did,” in an overstrained voice that made heads turn and eyebrows raise.

Guests came and went, but Emmeline Hamilton stayed. Lady Snow looked at her curiously more than once. Ivy kept out of her way.

It was growing late, but half a dozen tardy comers lingered over the blazing logs and tinkling tea-cups, and Emmeline pushed into the group, shivering a little, and drawing about her thin, lightly clad shoulders the long-drooping fur that she had not left in the hall. Her mood had changed again.

“You were speaking of Sên King-lo,” she said—but no one had mentioned him there. “Every one is. It is odious that he should be tolerated among us. He ought to be horsewhipped out of the place.” And in spite of Lady Snow’s imperative gesture, she plunged into all the recent scandal—even into noisome details. And Sên King-lo came into the room as she shrilly told one nauseous item. “Had you heard all this?” she demanded pointedly of Ivy.

“Yes—all, though worded less uncomfortably, I’m glad to say, than you have,” Miss Gilbert said clearly, rising and crossing the room to Sên King-lo, who stood in the doorway with Sir Charles Snow beside him. “Good afternoon Mr. Sên,”—it was then that the other women turned and saw him,—“I was wishing you’d come. I want you to ride with me tomorrow. Will you take me?”

“You know how glad I always am,” he replied, as she gave him her hand. His face had not changed as he had unavoidably heard Emmeline’s last sentences. But his eyes flashed into Ivy’s as he held her fingers, and then he turned and went to his hostess, cool and quiet as he always was.

But Ivy spoke to him again as soon as Emma had greeted him.

“Thank you for my lilies,” she said with a glance down at them, and a smile into his eyes: “they are lovelier than ever today, I think.”

Before Sên could reply—and he never was slow—Miss Hamilton rose from her chair dramatically; but before she could speak, Sir Charles Snow gave her his arm and led her courteously from the room. Sên King-lo went to the door and opened and held it.

The others went almost at once, and Lady Snow went into the hall with the last to go and did not come back. But she said to Sên as she passed him, “Do stay and dine—we’ll none of us dress.”

“Shall I stay?” Sên asked Ivy, as the closed door left them alone.

“I want you to,” she answered. “And thank you again for my lilies. Won’t you have a few sprays—they’ll dress you for dinner—as they do me,” and she held out the sprays she’d pulled from her dress as she spoke.

“So they will,” Sên said, as he bowed over the tiny white bells of perfume and the fingers that gave them. “Thank you.”

CHAPTER XXIII

They rode the next day, and Ivy suggested “a Washington ride,” but Sên laughed and turned Sinbad towards the Potomac, across the bridge, into the icicled country roads.

No mention was made, of course, as none had been made the evening before, of the cancerous rumors with which society’s amiable chit-chat had been teeming for weeks, and the ugliest detail of which Emmeline had retailed shrilly yesterday as Sên stood within unavoidable earshot in Lady Snow’s drawing-room. But they felt a deeper companionship today than they had before; a more basic and secured good-fellowship, absolutely devoid of sentimentality, as little fettered or fed by sex as waxing comradeships between a man and a girl, congenial and heart-free, can be; a good-fellowship not unlike the friendship of Sên and Charles Snow, wholesomely and strongly rooted in a mutual respect which both felt could neither be destroyed nor damaged.

In spite of the cold, they rode slowly now and then. For the winter-kissed waysides were indescribably lovely, and Sên King-lo could not pass that loveliness quickly by. To him it was as if God had painted in silver and white and black the long out-rolled picture of the inimitable landscape’s scroll; painted and limned it, and breathed His high living message into it more supremely, more beautifully, than ever even the master-brush of great Ma Yuen had. They spoke to Sên King-lo and tingled his Chinese soul: the long sweeps of glorious panoramic beauty, with each tiniest black leafless twig softened by cuddling little drift-patches of spotless snow and sparkling with diamond dew-drops of ice. To the English girl it looked just fairyland, exquisitely beautiful, quite unreal—and she heard no message. Such the difference of her Western spirit and eyes and his of the East. She saw it a wonderful spectacle and was glad she’d come; he merged in it, and forgot self—and was silent. And from his silence, the far-look in his eyes, the slight flush on his face, she caught something of his mood, too, perhaps, just a something of his spirit. They never before had been so close—or so far. She echoed his pleasure, but could not share his absorption; she alien here, in the white Virginia woods, with snow and thin gleams of ice where ice and snow come but rarely, the white passion of December rapturously calling Earth its bride. Sên King-lo felt at home; for the hour, no longer afar from China. Not once in many years does winter show so in England. In his Chinese home Sên had seen winter so a thousand times.

They lingered—but as the sun sank, backing the black and gray tree-trunks with royal colors, they turned back towards the city. As they neared it the girl turned her head at the quick clatter of hoofs behind them—gaining upon them, almost, she thought, as if in pursuit.

Again today no groom was with them.

She saw who it was and turned her head back with an impatient frown on her face but said nothing.

Sên King-lo did not see Reginald Hamilton until Hamilton drew his horse neck and neck with Sên’s.

Hamilton did not lift his hat, and King-lo’s slim fingers tightened slightly on his riding-crop.

Reginald was winded, a little. He was no great horseman, and he had been drinking—though not to excess. It was physical inconvenience and personal emotion that quivered and belched him far more than bourbon and bitters.

“I’ll deal with you later, you yellow, opium-sodden chimpanzee,” he cried thickly, with an insulting motion of his whip. “Be off with you now! I’ll not allow you to ride with this lady. Don’t let me catch you so much as speaking to her again, you vermin-fed laundry whelp! Understand?”

Sên smiled slightly, his eyes perfectly quiet, and turned to the girl beside him.

“Please ride on a little, Miss Gilbert,” he asked easily. “I won’t be a moment.”

“No,” Ivy told him. “I stay with you. Are you going to kill him?”

“In your presence? No, not even whip him—merely set him on his feet. Please go. I’ll be with you almost at once.”

Ivy did not answer him. She had grown very white—but not with fear, not even with nervousness, Sên knew. She sat perfectly still, and she did not move or speak again.

Reginald raised his whip, a little unsteadily.

The Chinese man leisurely threw his reins over one arm, the loop of his crop over one finger, leaned lightly a little from his saddle, caught Reginald Hamilton by the arms, and swung him down to the ground—not roughly—setting him square on his feet.

Sên gave the riderless horse an imperative but friendly tap on its flank with his crop, and it started off at a slow trot.

Reginald stood stock-still; purple, spluttering, wordless.

“I hope it’ll find its stable,” Sên said to Ivy lightly. “I daresay it will; they usually do. Shall we walk our horses on, Miss Gilbert?”

They went on in silence, and after a few moments, because he saw how white and cold the girl’s face looked, Sên set a faster pace, and they kept it until, as they passed the Louise Home, Ivy slackened her reins and looked at him with a tinkle and gurgle of girlish laughter, which Sên King-lo, as Sir Charles did, always thought had a sound of China.

He looked at her with a question in his smile.

“I was thinking,” she told him—“I don’t think you’ll mind, we are good friends——”

“The best of friends,” Sên King-lo said gravely, holding his hat in his hand as he spoke.

“I was thinking of your hands, Mr. Sên, and of a silly thing I thought the first time we met—in the summer—at Miss Julia’s——”

“I have not forgotten where I first saw you,” Sên said, with no hint or sound of hidden meaning.

“Your hands—they are different—you know”—Ivy hesitated a little.

“Chinese,” Sên said.

“Yes,” the girl nodded, “and not very thick, and I wondered—that night at Miss Julia’s—how much use they’d be at fisticuffs. I know now, Mr. Sên.”

She let the chamois loop on her riding-crop just fleck the hand on his horse’s bridle as she spoke, her eyes freemason friendly on him.

Sên lay his hand on her pommel for a moment. “Chinese hands,” he told her, “that always will serve to take care of you when you allow me to be your escort.”

“I know that,” the girl said quietly.

CHAPTER XXIV

The story of Reginald Hamilton’s last ride in Washington never got out. His horse found its way back to its stable, quite uninjured, and that, plus a check for a bill never before too promptly paid, satisfied the liveryman who owned it. Unlike Washington society, he was not curious. And neither Ivy nor Sên King-lo told any one—for some weeks not even Sir Charles. Had Hamilton stayed on in Washington, probably both his cousin and their friend would have felt that Snow must be told—that he, the only man in America who had a right to do it, might stand between the girl and any further advances of the Reginald. But a week after his descent to the snow-thick road, Reginald and his sister, together, though not on speaking terms, betook them to Chicago.

Reginald Hamilton had been away from Washington for a few days when Emmeline had achieved her newspaper coup; and on his return, after the ill-fated paragraph’s contradiction, she had managed to prevent him from attempting a tardy intervention. But he had heard all about it, of course; and, though not quite dull enough to doubt that the invention had been Emmeline’s, with intention and hope behind it, it had humiliated as well as enraged him; and this, added to his thwarted and growing passion for Ivy, had swung him quite off his balance of mind and breeding, never very secure. And his outrageous and, because futile, absurd behavior had been, at least in part, a demented blow struck in his sister’s defense. He, craven though he was, would have slain Emmeline himself before he’d have seen her married to a Chinese; but he was infuriated that Chinese Sên King-lo had scorned the hint which, as Hamilton (and all Washington) knew, Emmeline more than once had given.

By mid-January the rumors that had smirched Sên’s name had died away and made room for others about some one else. Washington society has too many sensations to dawdle long over one—and too many great interests to quite lose its head over things that are in truth as uninteresting as they are vicious and petty.

Sên still rode and walked with Ivy, had long Anglo-Chinese conferences with Snow, still played with Dick and Blanche, sometimes carrying them off to have several hours of high-jinks in his own rooms. Sir Charles went there sometimes, and Emma Snow had had tea there with Sên King-lo twice and had lunched there once with Sên and Miss Julia: a very great and unmerited honor for Sên, Uncle Lysander thought. Kow Li had a different opinion which he kept to himself.

Ivy had not been invited. Mary Withrow and Lucille Smith wondered why. Emma Snow and Dr. Ray, who still was in Washington, thought they knew, but, like Kow Li, each kept her opinion strictly to herself.

A great English statesman was the lion of the January hour. His name was world-known, and he had married a minor royalty. He was staying with the Snows, and Lady Snow’s big drawing-room was insufficient for her callers.

Sir Charles and his wife had gone with the Duke to the White House an hour ago, and Sên King-lo and Ivy were looking at the confession her cousin’s guest had written just before dinner; the first contribution of that sort she had asked for since Sên’s.

“That reminds me,” she said, as he closed the book, and she took it from him and opened it again, turning the pages until she found his, “I’ve always meant to ask you or Charlie and always forgotten to do it—I’ve such a sieve of a head.” She laid her finger below the character that stood for a woman’s name. “Will you pronounce it for me?”

Sên spoke the Chinese word.

She made him repeat it and tried to say it after him.

“Oh, it would take me years! What an appalling language!” She laughed at him. “But I like your favorite name, Mr. Sên. I like its sound when you say it. I think it is beautiful.”

“The most beautiful word in the world to me,” Sên said—“the most beautiful name in the world. We Chinese are said to crave only sons. But as long as I can remember, my heart’s desire has been to have a daughter whose mother would let me give her that name.”

He spoke quite simply, for all his English training, too Chinese to feel any mawkish hesitancy in speaking to a friend, a girl he respected, of life’s best realities. Something that hurt a little, something new and strange, pricked at Ivy Gilbert’s heart.

Sên King-lo’s wife! His Chinese wife! She had never thought of her. She always had thought of him as just Sên King-lo—the Sên King-lo she knew and liked and talked with and rode with—unmarried, here in Washington to stay. More often than not she forgot that he was not English, more alien than she was, alien very differently from her. Of course he’d go back to China—and marry there—some day. Why not? How silly she was! All Chinese married. She didn’t know much about them, but she knew that much. Had his ancestors worn pig-tails? Even his own father, perhaps! It was a horrid thought. She looked up from the Chinese page of her book to the Chinese man on the other side of the small, low table between them, a sudden fear, a revulsion, in her young English eyes—and looked down again very quickly.

“Of course you couldn’t write it in English,” she spoke a little breathlessly; “you had to leave the space blank. There isn’t any English name for the Chinese name, of course. You couldn’t translate it.”

“No,” he told her, “that was not the reason. There is an English translation for many Chinese names—and this is one. I have written it in English—once or twice,” he added with a smile that neither he nor she understood.

“Then why—” she began.

“It was my girl-mother’s name, Miss Gilbert, and I love it for that, even far more than I do for the music it makes—it is music in my language and in yours. It was the last word my father ever spoke.”

“I beg your pardon,” Ivy told him shyly. “I’m so sorry. Of course, you wouldn’t write it in my confession-book.”

“But I did. I wrote it in Chinese. I’ll write it now in English, if you’ll let me. I didn’t when I wrote the English pages, because I could not take that liberty with your name.”

“My——”

Sên King-lo’s eyes kindled into hers. “My mother’s name”—his lips seemed to caress it as he spoke it—“was Ruby.”

And then the girl knew.

CHAPTER XXV

Sên King-lo did not know—yet. But Ivy knew.

Almost always the woman knows first—no matter how inexperienced she is, or how experienced he.

Ivy knew. And because she reeled a little under the shock—and all that it meant—she blundered into words that were the last she’d have spoken, if she and her tongue had known what they were doing.

“How odd! Your mother’s name was Ruby Sên.”

She knew what she’d said the moment she’d said it, and she flushed, face and neck, almost as crimson as a Chinese’s bride’s veil.

Even then the man did not know—neither his secret nor hers. But the first far-off glimmering of his own came to him then—like the shimmering scent of distant flowers or the tremble of music a long way away.

He saw Ivy’s confusion, the red on her face, and that her lips and hands trembled a little. But he mistook it to be only her vexation for a faux pas that the sensitive taste of so nice a girl exaggerated out of all proportion to the small thing it was.

“But no,” he reminded her with a light laugh, “it was not—it was Sên Ruby.”

Ivy laughed too then. But the odd inverted sound of it hurt her—“Sên Ruby”—reminding her, admonishing her, of the bar eternally set, the race-bar that decency—or was it prejudice?—set between East and West. She never could leap that bar, and she knew that he never would. “English-Chinese!”

She was glad when Sên King-lo went to the piano. (Was it tact or because he felt like playing? she wondered. It was both.) And she was still more glad when Emma came in with Sir Charles and the Duke. And as soon as she decently could she said goodnight and left them.

She was very weary as she trudged up the easy stairs—and her young soul was bitter. Other girls kept their dreams—at least for a time—but she might not keep hers for an hour—not for one heart-beat of time.

Chinese!

She lay awake a long time wishing the day would come, dreading its coming. She did not hear the front door close, but she heard Sên’s step as it passed under her window, and she smothered her ears in her pillow.

It was almost morning when at last she slept, and she dreamed of Sên King-lo’s wife—his Chinese wife and hated her. She dreamed of Sên King-lo in Chinese dress—skirts, hair, and all—and loathed herself. She mocked herself, and his eyes mocked her.

She woke to a rush of thought—the thought that her name was “Ruby” and that she was more glad of that than she ever had been of anything else. Charles called her “Ruby” almost as often as he did “Ivy.” What a pale insipid name “Ivy” was—a silly name. Why hadn’t they called her only “Ruby”?

Oh, the shame and the pain of it all! To have given her love unasked, unsought, unwanted! And to a man of a debarred race! But why? Why was it debarred? Did he know? Did he suspect it? Had she told him? She shivered down in her warm bed and closed her miserable eyes—ashamed to have even the daylight see her. How was she to face Emma and Charlie—and Sên King-lo? He must never know. Whatever he believed now, led to by her, she must convince him that he had made an absurd mistake. She would.

At breakfast Sir Charles smiled affectionately at her, glad to see her so happy and full of fun, and the Duke chuckled more than once. Marie should ask her to stay with them when the Snows came home, and if Rupert fell in love with her—who cared? Not Rupert’s father. Not he! But Emma, watching and listening, grew grave at heart, and her eyes were anxious though her lips smiled. How Charlie would hate it! Her poor Charlie! If only they’d left Ivy at home in England!

For Lady Snow knew what neither Ivy nor Sên King-lo did and had little doubt of how it would end. But she feared that in the meantime Ivy was going to be very ill. The girl was drinking too much coffee, and she was forcing herself to eat.

All day Ivy listened for a voice and a footstep. She longed not to see Sên King-lo again. But her pride told her she must; and, more than she wished not to face him again, she longed to do so and get it well over. She’d carry her head high to the last. And she’d find an excuse to go back to England after Easter. She never had promised to stay with Emma and Charles forever. Whatever she’d do there, however she’d contrive to live there, she did not know. But that did not matter.

Sên King-lo did not come that day. But he sent flowers in his stead—although he had sent her some only yesterday.

Today—for the first time since he had sent them—he sent her no lilies. When Ivy opened the florist’s box it held only roses—deep-scented, red roses the color of rubies.

Ivy tucked two or three in her belt; it would look less strange, perhaps, to Sên, if he came, than if she did not, she thought.

She and Lady Snow lunched alone that day, and Emma wondered who had sent those roses—but didn’t ask or look at them particularly. But at dinner the Duke had no such scruple.

“You have changed your flowers,” he remarked. “I thought you always wore lilies-of-the-valley.”

“Not always. A friend gives me lilies sometimes.”

“Rather often,” the Duke observed slyly.

“I bought my red roses,” Ivy continued, “and I paid dear for them.”

“Flowers are a scandalous price in winter,” the Duke agreed.

“These were!” Ivy laughed.

Lady Snow shot her a covert glance. Why had Ivy told that lie? There was no need for her to have said anything. She had not bought those roses. The house was full of flowers always, and Ivy always was free of them all. Ivy’s money went, almost to a dollar, on clothes. How had they cost her dear? That much had sounded true to Emma Snow’s quick ears.

“By the way,” Sir Charles asked presently, “what was Blanche crying so hard over this afternoon?”

Ivy flushed and answered. “She was in a temper because I would not give her one of my roses.”

The two men looked surprised. How unlike Ivy, Sir Charles thought, and was puzzled.

Lady Snow crumbled her bread. She was not puzzled. She knew now. Sên King-lo had sent those roses. But how had Ivy paid dear for them—the flowers of which she would not spare Blanche even one? Had she refused Sên King-lo last night? She—Emma—feared not.

CHAPTER XXVI

Two more days passed, and then Sên came.

Ivy met him gaily, bearing herself so naturally, her gaiety so unexaggerated, that she almost deceived herself and must have deceived him completely, if it ever had entered his head that she cared for him at all beyond friendliness—which it never had. He knew the signs of open and almost-open infatuation; these signs had been hurled at him too hard and too persistently not to have driven their flagrant message in. But the signs of a rapprochement that gave no sign and offered or asked no approach were hidden from his sharp eyes. And the warming inclination of an essentially modest girl, who also was both proud and self-in-hand, showed not at all to Sên, who not only was not vain, but even was modest.

Their camaraderie went on as it had. Ivy was too proud to check it at all, and after a little, even to her shocked sensitiveness, much of the gnawing bitterness wore away, and all the pleasure and sweetness stayed.

Her disgust and self-revulsion because she had turned in personal affection—emotion even—to a man so set from her by race quite slipped away, and only her shame at loving unloved and unsought remained.

Again she found it hard to remember that Sên was Chinese—less of her own race than a Spaniard or Russian was. It was he, his personality that appealed to and pleased her, and she did not realize that his race was a strong and essential part of both, and that in both he was intensely Chinese. To her he was merely the man, because so much the man.

And when she did think about it—that he was Chinese, she English—it gradually grew to her a lesser and almost negligible thing. Chinese and English of gentle birth did not marry. But was it a sound decency or only a cheap and sorry prejudice that barred the way? Inherited reason said “decency,” but her heart and her own estimate of Sên, her own satisfaction and ease in his companionship, leaned to the other answer. She ceased to feel any shame that she had given her love—for she was relentlessly frank with herself as to that—to an Asian. But that she had let herself care for a man who gave her no thought of that sort in return shamed her cruelly. And she guarded her secret well—now that she knew it herself. Her ignorance had been her danger-time. It was past. She guarded it so well that she deceived eyes sharper to the thing she hid than were the eyes of unsuspecting Sên King-lo. And he had no need to guard. It is easy enough to hide what does not exist. Even Lady Snow began to think that her alarm had barked up a phantom tree, and laughed at herself—and was glad. And Sir Charles laughed up his sleeve at his fanciful wife, and Miss Julia laughed scornfully up hers at Elenore Ray. And only Dr. Ray was not deceived—and said nothing. She saw it all—saw even what neither Ivy nor Sên did. And things went on between Sên King-lo and the English girl as they had—but they went; they did not stand quite stock still. Things are not apt to do that between a man and a maid in springtime. He told her more and more of China than he had, and she learned how to write her second name in Chinese, and one day—it was almost May—Sên King-lo filled the blank he had left in the confession-book. And Ivy locked the book away—not to be written in again, she intended. But she took it out and looked in it sometimes.

In April the spring was coming. Soft sticky things showed on the leaf-bare trees, if you looked close enough. The grass was reasserting itself. Poor people slacked their fires. Fruit from “down South” was cheaper. Stuffs in the drygoods shops were thinner and paler. The skies gave a promise of summer. The moon laughed again, and some days at noontide the Potomac laughed back at the sun. The magnolia on Miss Julia’s sunniest wall hinted of buds, and then the buds began to swell, and Lysander and Dinah sorted out turkey-wings and long-handled brooms of peacocks’ feathers against the coming of flies, and spoke of “them ornery niggah’s summer cloes,” and dreamed at night of big watermelons and green peas.

Ivy just glanced at the house on the other side of the street as she and Sên passed it as they were walking together one late April day. She knew from the number that he lived over there and, from what Emma had said, which were his sitting-room windows, but she never had happened to pass it on foot and in day-time. She had sent notes to him there, but she was not a girl who would go to look where a man friend lived. She made no remark about it now, and neither did he.

“I think you are wrong,” he was saying. “As I read it, Ruskin meant——”

Ivy caught his arm and gave a cry.

Two small spotted ponies had dashed madly around the corner from M Street, not quite missing the sharp curb; ponies she usually drove herself when the children would go and Watkins could not be spared. A very small groom with a very white face was seesawing wildly at the reins, just the one thing to infuriate the already crazily maddened ponies. Who had trusted Buttons to drive? Where was Charlie? Was Emma mad? Justine should go for this. Blanche was sobbing and screaming betimes. Dick seemed in scarcely manlier shape, and just as Sên dashed towards the ponies and caught their bridles as in a vise, Dick screamed, and jumped. Buttons gave a superhuman wrench at the reins—one rein broke—and the low phaeton lurched over. Both the children were pinioned under its wreck.

The maddened ponies squealed with fear and rage. They were trembling violently, but they moved on not an inch more. Sên King-lo was holding them. He dared not leave their heads, but Ivy, steeling herself to go to him, saw the agony on his face as he looked at the turned-over trap under which the children lay. The boy driver sat on the sidewalk crying weakly.

“Can you pull the whip out from under there—it is under the wheel—and give him a cut?” Sên asked.

“Perhaps he is hurt,” Ivy murmured shakily.

“I don’t care if he is dead,” Sên snapped. “You and he must lift it off those babies. Be quick! But first put your hand in my pocket—trouser pocket—this left one—get my knife—open it. Can you cut the traces? Be quick!”

She fumbled with the knife, but—though she ripped her light glove and tore her nail—she could not open the blade. The ponies were plunging wildly, and they were strong little beasts—only the man holding them now ever would know how strong.

Sên called sharply to the boy squat on the curb; but Buttons sat still and continued to blubber.

“Hold it up to my mouth—but look out for their hoofs!” Sên told her.

Ivy obeyed, but as his teeth tugged at the blade—perhaps her hands trembled a little in spite of her, for a moan of pain came from under the overturned phaeton—the blade slipped and a trickle of blood went from Sên’s lip to his stern-set chin.

“Now cut the traces. You must!”

Ivy tried.

“Saw—saw like hell!”

The moments seemed like hours. Sên knew that the sinews of his left arms were perilously strained—that was nothing, if only their strength held—and Ivy thought that she was only scratching the strong leather she tried to cut.

Oddly so at this hour, the street seemed deserted—no other help in sight or call.

One trace gave a little—then snapped.

“The other!” Sên commanded. “Don’t get too near when you go round. Keep clear of their legs. Be as quick as you can!”

She thought her strength was failing; she knew her legs shook; but she made the attempt and reached the other side and feebly attacked the second trace. Sên’s task was harder now, because of the one severed trace which, light as the little carriage was, had served in the entanglement as some slight cheek on the plunging, straining ponies.

A window went up, a colored woman looked out and screamed. A perambulator jolted round the corner. Small beginnings and not helpful ones; but the inevitable crowd was coming at last, and just as the knife slipped from Ivy’s unnerved fingers, a very fat, deliberate policeman sauntered into sight. But he was worthy his uniform, for he instantly saw his need and filled it; ran to Sên’s side, blowing his whistle as he ran, and caught at the near pony’s bit.

“I can hold them,” Sên said. “Get the trap off—carefully—there are children under it.”

“There would be!” the policeman grumbled. But again he lost no time, and as men and women, sundry children and dogs, and a cautious sprinkling of cats thickened the street into a crowd, and more heads showed at windows, and people on steps, he, unaided, lifted the wreck off, clear from the little bodies beneath.

There was blood. Dick lay badly still. Blanche was moaning.

Help had come to Sên in abundance now—another policeman, a handsome young Jew—who didn’t need to be told, but did it; a maiden lady who wore a green beige veil over a New England bombazine bonnet and steel-rimmed spectacles on her high-bridged nose; a Jesuit priest and a Salvation corporal. The men were enough to hold the still struggling runaways as securely as Sên had done alone; and the ponies already were growing quieter under the hand and the voice of the old New England woman, speaking to them companionably, as she fearlessly stroked and patted them. So Sên King-lo, with questioning torture in his eyes, Saxon pallor on his tawny face, and sickening pain in his shoulders, left the newcomers in charge there, and went to Ivy just in time to see her kneel down and gather Blanche up in her arms. He saw how gently she did it, saw the look on her face, the tears in her eyes, and that she would not let them fall, and he saw the welcoming gladness on the welcoming baby face as Ivy lifted Blanche up and nested the child’s bleeding face against her girlish breast.

Sên lifted motionless Dick and bent his ear to the boy’s face. Dick was breathing.

They carried the children up to Sên’s rooms—the constables protesting and suggesting the ambulance. But they accepted Ivy’s, “I am their cousin,” Sên King-lo’s more imperative, “’Phone for their father —Sir Charles Snow—British Embassy;—Massachusetts Avenue, if he’s gone home. I am taking them to my rooms.” And the policeman who had seen Sên holding the demented ponies even put his finger up to his helmet.