CHAPTER XXVII

Dick, more frightened than hurt, was carried home that same night; but wee Blanche was badly hurt, and the doctor would not allow them to move her. The wound on her head was a bad one, her little arm was broken, one baby leg crushed, and most of all the doctors, who came and went hourly, feared internal injuries they could not gage and dare not probe yet. For two weeks the child lay swathed and drugged in Sên King-lo’s bed. And Ivy never left her. Even in her drugged stupor—she was too weak for them to drug her heavily—she stirred and whimpered if her cousin went from her. Two nurses were installed, but only from Ivy would the stricken mite take mixture or suffer touch. She looked at her father with hard, hurt eyes; she scarcely noticed her mother; she turned her face from the kindly doctors; hated the nurses, and said so; and it must have gone hard with Ivy for a snatch of food and rest, had Blanche not taken a sudden fancy to Kow Li. She screamed if Ivy moved from her side, unless Kow Li took the cousin’s place. She even fretted after a short half-hour and called for Ivy; and when she did, the girl always came. But, thanks to Kow Li, Miss Gilbert did get half-hour snatches of rest in the next room: Sên King-lo’s living room, his Chinese books about it, traces of him everywhere, and as much an atmosphere of China as if it had been in Pekin. Why that was so would be hard to say, but it was. Almost all the sparse furnishing was Western: easy-chairs and chesterfield, many books, and water-colors mostly English. There were no bamboos, pictured or real—not a dragon nor a joss-stick. But the room breathed China, and a girl’s sensitiveness caught it, as only one visitor had before: Sir Charles. And he had lived in China.

After the first frightened hour’s absorption she had realized poignantly that these were Mr. Sên’s rooms—the intimate place of his being and keeping, as true of him and as redolent of him as Rosehill was of Miss Julia.

Miss Julia slept on a large and very elaborate bed; Sên King-lo slept on one that could not comfortably have been narrower, so narrow that even wee, ill Blanche was not lost in it, and so Spartan-plain that its new occupant considered it “horrid shabby,” and said so the first day she was well enough to take the slightest interest in anything but her own aching body. Miss Julia’s bedroom walls were covered with portraits, all but one of dead and gone Townsends, many as babies, two in their coffins: daguerreotypes, pastels, oils, water-colors, photographs, plain and colored; the one other, the largest and most handsomely framed, a portrait of Robert E. Lee in Confederate uniform. Only one picture hung on Sên King-lo’s bedroom walls—Kwan Yin-ko. And, under the doctors and Ivy herself, that Chinese Holy Mother of Mercy wrought the loving miracle of the English baby’s recovery. For Kwan Yin-ko caught the child’s roving eye almost at once and riveted it. The nurses thought it a horrible picture, and the night nurse, who had been scrupulously well brought up in Bangor, Maine, disliked being in the room with the ugly heathenish thing. But Blanche pronounced it a most beautiful lady, and Kow Li owed half his firm place in the small invalid’s heart to the skilful stories he told her of Kwan Yin-ko—and a weird jumble of mythology, fairy-tales and pure lie he made them! But they gave the English child infinite delight, and Ivy Gilbert many a refreshing half-hour of sleep out in the next room on Sên King-lo’s sofa.

Sên himself slept now at his own Legation and at the Snows’. Sir Charles and his wife came and went, and so did Sên King-lo; but Ivy lived in Sên’s rooms—while Blanche stayed there. Emma Snow had begged to share Ivy’s care of the child; but her grief and anxiety made her too tearful for medical approval, and the doctors limited her comings, and the nurses speeded her departures, while Blanche, with baby ruthlessness, made it clear that it was “mine own Nivy” she wanted.

The nurses had a sinecure. Miss Gilbert and yellow Kow Li usurped their office. In less than a week the night nurse and the Chinese Goddess parted company, and the day nurse went out more and more and knew well enough that she was there for a social reason, and as a fall-back-on, should the need occur, but that Ivy was in charge. And being a sensible girl, born and bred in New York and well paid, the day nurse did not care in the least.

Their small encounter with half-tipsy Reginald Hamilton had marked an advance in the comradeship of the Chinese man and the English girl. It had so impelled Ivy more than it did Sên—naturally. The accident to the children drew both to a stronger liking, and Sên to a new understanding.

He had saved the two little lives, there was no question of that—Charles and Emma knew it and said it, and so did two physicians and three policemen, and the newspapers underlined it. And Ivy had seen him do it. He had had to wear his left arm in a sling for a day or two.

She had seen his strength again—no doubt now about those delicate hands of his—but she had seen something of that before, and his courage and cool-headed resource had not surprised her. To her it had seemed as much a matter of course that he had proved brave and clear-witted as it had to him to swing tipsy insolence down to the snowy roadway.

But he had seen a new woman, a new womanliness. He had seen the love as well as the pain on her face as she had bent down to the mangled baby out there under his window, and had gathered it up into her arms.

They two had been alone with the injured children a long quarter of an hour that had seemed longer, before the doctor had come, or even Kow Li, who had gone on an errand. Both had some skill at “first aid”—he much more than her—and he had seen the grit with which she had held the broken arm in place while he did the little he could for the crushed little leg; had seen the tenderness and strength with which she had soothed and controlled the pain-and-fright-broken mite; and had known that Ivy Gilbert’s “flaw” had been the unjust creation of his own crass stupidity.

Chinese omniscience has its human limits. Sên King-lo had learned that a woman is not necessarily unwomanly, or unloving of little children because she has little flair for blindman’s-buff and leap-frog, and even less for “I am, thou art, he is” and “three times three is nine.”

CHAPTER XXVIII

Sên let himself in quietly; the doctors forbade knocking or ringing—Blanche might be asleep. His sitting-room door was open, and he glanced in cautiously as he stood in the hall, a little shyly—in case a girl dozed or lay on the chesterfield. Lady Snow had asked him to call here for her at three, and it was just on three.

No one was in the sitting-room. There was not a sound in the place.

So Lady Snow had succeeded in taking Miss Gilbert out for an hour, as she’d told him she was going to try to do. And only Kow Li was in there with Blanche, who must be sleeping, because she wasn’t talking and neither was Kow Li.

The door into the bedroom, his own room—but Blanche’s now—also was wide open. Sên tiptoed to it. He’d take a peep at the sleeping baby and beckon Kow Li out, if she hadn’t clutch-hold of his hands or his sleeve as she so often had. Sên rather thought he’d have to give Kow Li to Blanche next Christmas.

Sên King-lo paused at the sill of his bedroom door, rooted there by a force he never had felt before.

He knew.

Baby Blanche was fast asleep.

But Ivy was not.

She knelt by the bed, all the sweetness of girlhood unspoiled, all the motherhood-love in the face she bent over the child that slept in her cradling arms, baby head on maiden breast. And Kwan Yin-ko up on the wall, was guarding them both.

And Sên King-lo knew.

A great light came into his eyes. A sudden beat under his ribs made a vein on his forehead swell and throb, quivered his lips; and all his being rushed to the kneeling girl.

As quietly as he had come in, he turned and went, and went from the house, an up-to-date Washington flat that was a sanctuary now.

He knew his own secret now, knew it as completely and as surely as he had learned it suddenly.

Nature had torn a veil aside, and a man had looked in.

He had seen his own soul, and he knew that if ever life gave him a child—a girl-child, perhaps, to bear his mother’s name—he but now had seen its mother—an English girl kneeling beside his bed.

He walked away from the city, taking his course to the woods across the river.

He knew the bar—the impossibilities—the disaster and petty, sore frets that passionate disobedience must bring. He knew and believed all this as no untraveled girl could. To call a halt to her heart Ivy had only instinct and a convention for which she had lost respect—had lost it because of what she had found in him. He had conviction, China, thousands of years. The bar that she had come to think but inconvenience and problem, a drawbridge of race that might—were the motive enough—be lowered or raised, was to him an impenetrable, unsurmountable wall—the Greater Wall of China, with never a breach or loophole in its everlasting imperial masonry.

If ever his puissant, virile manhood—the wholesomeness and sweetness of his being—the heritage his fathers had given—pulsed to manhood’s gravest sacrament, life’s perfect fulfilment, he had seen today—there in his room, the mate of his being, the core of his soul, his children’s mother.

And she was forbidden.

Did she suspect?

Could he have taught her to care? English Ruby! English!

What was he going to do about it?

Elenore Ray could have told him.

CHAPTER XXIX

Sên King-lo gave a cry; a thousand words could not have said more.

Ivy and he had lunched at Miss Julia’s—blind Miss Julia—and were walking home through the woods, at least as far as the river. They might find a cab near the bridge, or, if not, they could take a street-car there.

Here in the quiet old wood where two months ago he had brought his new revelation, to be alone with it, to creep into Nature’s rest, to lift his eyes to the sky and the darkling hills, to cool his burn and still his soul amid the trees where now buds swelled and hidden sap lifted, to wash and clean his hands and his spirit in the crisp air that whispered of summer—they loitered a time because it was so beautiful here, and because they were together.

June flowers grew in the grass; a beryl and cinnabar sky crowned and mantled the world. The trees were heavy and big with leaf, grave and gay with a score of greens. Bees hummed to the wild roses. An old apple-tree, late but lusty of blossoms, buffeted and bent by a thousand gales—but its good roots held—lay prone on the ground. Its flowers lay a perfumed white and rose veil heaped on ferns and hare-bells. A baby squirrel sat bolt up on the prostrate gnarled trunk, industriously washing his baby face. The summer air had a score of scents and bore on its fragrant warmth one message. And married birds were teaching their babies to fly.

They ought not to have come here—the man and the girl who had grappled their wills to renouncement—not here to this perfumed place of fulfilment.

It was here that Sên King-lo had brought his new joy and sorrow one late afternoon in April—had sat an hour where the cleanly squirrel sat now, and had fought his first round in his battle with self.

He had made up mind and purpose then in the only way he could. Marriage between him—Chinese—and an English girl, even if he could win her to it, which he believed he could not—must not be; should not. And from that he never had wavered, did not waver now. He had thought it all out bit by bit and had made his paramount resolve, and little by little the plan of his nearer days. Since he might not ask what he most craved, he would hold but the faster, while he might, to what he already had: friendship and sweet welling companionship. He never could marry; it was written; and because it was, he would garner every dear memory he could to comfort his years. But again and again the dream came of an English Ruby sitting in firelight and garden—his firelight, his garden—while his eyes played with her hair. He knew it a dream. He would not, if he could, have it a fact. But he knew he would keep it forever and dream it again and again while his years lasted. Take it home with him some day and dream it again when he sat a childless old man on the banks of the Yellow Sorrow.

They ought not to have come here or lingered.

Sên King-lo knew his own strength; but, Chinese though he was, he did not know Nature’s.

“What a ripping old hero,” he said, pointing down to the prostrate tree, “game to the last.” He gathered her a spray of the rosy apple-blossoms and buds and filched for his coat another. “We must come here—in September. The apples that grow on so brave a tree should be good—full of tang, like wine. We’ll eat them in September. It’s a bargain?”

“But I am going home in August,” she told him and added lightly, though her lips felt stiff, “Didn’t you know?”

Sên King-lo gave a cry.

Their eyes met.

There was neither China nor England—nor Virginia. There was only a man and a girl—and Nature: in all the world nothing else.

“You must not go—from me,” he said. “I cannot live without you. You are my life.” He held his arms out to her with a gesture that pleaded—but claimed.

Ivy took a step towards him.

Sên King-lo did the rest. He wrapped his arms and his love about her. He laid his face on her face.

Presently he whispered words in her ear—Chinese words. She knew none of them—but she did not hear them as strange.

He cupped her face in his hands and put it from him a little, that he might learn it again, that his eyes might speak his love to her eyes.

And her eyes did not falter. They took what he gave.

“Will you come home—with me—some day—to China?”

“To the end of the world,” she told him. She had not spoken before.

And he took her back into love’s tender, reverent crushing, his face against her face.

There was neither England nor China, nor Virginia: there was only Heaven.

A gray cloud darkened the beryl and cinnabar sky. The Potomac ran colder.

CHAPTER XXX

Washington was delighted; so were the papers—and proclaimed it. Things were a little dull in newspaperdom just now, and the Anglo-Chinese engagement was a savory tit-bit capable of being served up in a number of ways, and was. Dick and Blanche were in an ecstasy, and girls Ivy scarcely knew touted shamelessly to be her bridesmaids. Every one was surprised, which made it all the more exciting. Every one, with only three exceptions: Lady Snow, Dr. Ray and Kow Li. Even Emma Snow was a little surprised, but not so the Chicago physician and Sên’s Chinese manservant.

It had been expected long ago; but it had hung fire so long that Washington society had quite made up its mind that there was nothing in it beyond a friendship too long-drawn-out and too serene to have even the zest of flirtation, and Lady Snow herself had come to lean to that opinion now and then. Until a June day and an old apple-tree had rent the veil, Sên and Ivy had kept their mutual secret so well from each other that it was scarcely surprising that they had balked others of it.

Not many in Washington approved, but most were pleased—a very different thing—and the papers were honestly grateful.

It came with all the toothsome surprise of an unforeseen sensation. And the wedding would be great fun. Would they be married at the Church of the Ascension? Was Sên King-lo a Christian? Nobody seemed to know. Or would they take Convention Hall or the Lafayette Square Opera House and be married on the stage with Chinese rites by Chinese priests, with posture girls at the back and tom-toms in the orchestra, and fire-crackers for confetti? What fun!

Truck-loads of Chinese junk, real and imitation, poured in on Ivy from mere acquaintances, and from a number whom she had not met, but was going to meet now—if they could contrive it. Lucille Smith sat on the doorstep, and for days Ivy had to stay indoors to avoid reporters and camera men—even the back-door and the tradesmen’s gate were “watched”—and Sên King-lo was photographed every time he came to see his fiancée, which was often.

But if the four hundred and the outer thousand were pleased and palate-tickled, a handful of others, and they more nearly interested, were not.

Julia Calhoun Townsend was ill with rage and disgust. Charles Snow was anxious and bitterly anxious too. The Chinese Minister didn’t like it, but told no one so. Kow Li didn’t like it at all, but only told an opium pipe—a very harmless opium-pipe. Uncle Lysander was enormously shocked and disgusted, and he lost no time and spared no pains in noising it abroad that he was. Elenore Ray and Emma Snow stood by Ivy, and the little they said to outsiders was in approval; but at heart neither approved, and each was sorry, Lady Snow the more so and the more acutely. With Elenore Ray an eager scientific and psychological interest somewhat dulled her personal and friendly anxiety.

Julia Townsend writhed. She closed her doors to Sên King-lo and to Miss Gilbert and told them so in frigidly phrased notes written in the third person. A week later she sent for them both—separately—and pleaded and argued. She stormed and wept at Sên King-lo. Ivy came in for most of the pleading, though Sên had his share, and it was to Ivy that she said the hardest and the more questionable things, for she could not quite break the reticence of generations in speaking of intimate things to any man.

Miss Julia quarreled with Dr. Ray because Elenore Ray would not altogether condemn or at all ostracize, and Sir Charles Snow very nearly quarreled with his wife—and that he did not quite do so was Emma’s fault, not his. He was wretchedly unhappy about it.

Miss Julia hurt Ivy a little and angered her bitterly—but accomplished nothing, lost a friendship and didn’t score a point. Sên King-lo she did not anger at all; venomous speech is a Chinese privilege of old age and of women—and Sên King-lo valued her words, not for what they said, but for the kindness that he knew had forced her to speak them; he remembered all her gracious motherliness of years to him, the exquisite, pathetic motherliness of child-deprived and aging spinsterhood. He was neither hurt nor angered, and his gratitude and his affection held. But some of her words and the truth they spoke troubled him. He could not brush them aside, and he could not forget them. Sên King-lo knew the risk he was taking—far better than Miss Julia could. She guessed it a little, spurred by prejudice to state it sourly. He knew it; both his intelligence and his honesty acknowledged it; his courage accepted it. He accepted it, gladly even, now for himself. But—for Ivy? Was the risk he was going to let her take too cruel, too close a risk? Such a marriage would have its pricks, and sometimes its scourge. He had no doubt of that. Could he keep every prick and scourge for him alone, keep them all from her? He said “Goodbye” to Miss Julia as affectionately as she would permit, more sadly than he would show. And his heart had a heavy ache as the door of Rosehill closed behind him forever, and he went through Rosehill’s gate for the last time.

Every goodbye has its tinge of sadness. We know the ills we have; not the ills to come. The released prisoner throws a long last look at his gaol as the warder locks him out. To say goodbye to old friendship, old kindness, old welcome is hard and sad indeed. It cuts.

Sir Charles took it harder than Julia Townsend did but attacked it more gravely and kindly, more gently. But he did his utmost.

To Emma his wife he showed his rancor and a little his tingling spleen. He went among his colleagues grimly. But to Sên King-lo he showed only his sorrow and anxiety and his friendship, and even more considerately to Ivy.

But he spoke.

He spoke to her with his hand on hers; but for all his cousinly kindness and all his diplomatic care, he angered her even more than he hurt—and he hurt. And he failed. He had expected to fail.

But he hoped not to fail with Sên King-lo.

CHAPTER XXXI

They argued it long and carefully—not once hotly—not once either failing in courtesy or affection. That was impossible because their mutual respect and affection was too well founded and seasoned—too deep and sincere. But no hint of rancor or unfairness on one part, or suspicion of it on the other, made Snow’s position and arguments the stronger and perhaps did not weaken either Sên’s attitude or his reply.

There was no “quarrel-scene” about it, only regret on both sides, by both frankly acknowledged.

“I dislike it,” Sir Charles began, passing his cigarettes—tobacco marks conference, not dispute—“I dread it utterly, and I ask you to consider it searchingly.”

“I believe I have done that, Sir Charles.”

“When!”

Sên smiled.

“Since, I’ll be bound,” Snow continued, “for I’m convinced that you’d not have done it—spoken. I mean—if you had thought it out beforehand. It came on impulse, I suspect.”

“Quite on impulse,” the other owned.

“It usually does,” Sir Charles Snow smiled as he sighed.

“But I had considered it from every angle, I think, before, as I also have since.”

“And you did not mean to speak?”

“I meant not to speak.”

“But you did; and now?”

“I certainly did,” Sên assented. “It was no speaking of Miss Gilbert’s.”

Both men smiled.

“And now, Sên?”

“I dislike it too,” Sên said quietly, “in some of its aspects.”

“Ah?”

“Because I dread it a little for her.”

“You have more cause to dread it for yourself,” the other said sharply. “Given considerable luck Ivy may go through it practically scot free. But for you, as I see it, it can be nothing but disaster. She may get through it comfortably enough—if she never goes East—” Sên winced a little and his eyes were grave—“but if you persist in it, you are running your head very tightly into a very rough noose.”

“I’ll risk that,” Sên’s eyes were smiling again, “and because I believe I can keep it from being sometimes an inconvenience to her, I do persist in it, Sir Charles.”

“Is it fair to her to persist in what you own you dislike?”

“Some of its possible rasps—probable rasps—only, and between which and her I believe that I can always stand. I intend to. And I like it,” Sên added, “incomparably more than I dislike—know and admit that I should dislike—one or two of its quite possible consequences.”

“Quite possible,” Snow repeated with quiet significance.

“I like it immensely, Sir,” Sên said with a boyish laugh but a man’s steady purpose and pride in his eyes.

“But you fear it.”

“No, scarcely fear it.”

“Fear it,” Snow insisted. “Take the way out. I beg you to—for both your sakes.”

“There is no way out,” Sên King-lo declared, “none that I can take, or will. If your cousin—you have spoken to her, of course, or will——”

“I have spoken to Ivy,” Snow told him grimly, “and made matters worse, if I did anything. She’ll not budge an inch. But you—you are reasonable. You will listen to what I have to say?”

“To every word of it and as long as you like.”

Snow plunged into his arguments—most of them the old ones that every student of “East and West” has heard again and again, and that dozens of pens have twisted and turned into well-grimed shreds. And, quite without offensiveness, he cut very much deeper into physical things—revulsions, apparent, if not actual, abnormality, and so on—than often a pen has dared to do.

In some points, Sên agreed; most he rejected or claimed to be outweighed.

“I saw it as you do, on the whole—until—the other day,” he admitted; “but I see it differently now.”

“You would,” Sir Charles said with a smile that was grim but patient and not unkind.

“I did not know—not until a short time ago—how it was with me. It took me quite by surprise.”

“It frequently does.”

“I was a dunce, of course, not to know where I was drifting.”

“We always are——”

“But when I found out and looked it in the face—I did do that—I firmly determined to——”

“Cut it out?”

“Yes, just that! And then—the other day——”

“It ran you out.”

Sên nodded. “And now,” he added, his face radiant, “I cannot give Ruby up!”

“Or think you can’t,” Snow insinuated. “So you call her Ruby! I like it best, and it suits her too. There is not much of the clinging vine about her, I think, and I assure you there was none at all yesterday when I attempted to say to her less than a tenth of what I have said to you.”

Sên laughed—rather proudly. Sir Charles Snow’s affectionate smile was grimmer.

“I’m afraid I’ve filched your own name for her,” Sên King-lo said. “I too think it suits her the better, and it’s the name I’ve always cared for most—it was my mother’s name.”

“By Jove!” Snow murmured, and added under his breath, “I’d forgotten that.”

Sên King-lo looked up in amazement from the match he was striking, and his eyes were not pleased. How came this Englishman to have heard that? A Chinese gentleman does not name his wife to another man—and in China her children may not speak it.

They smoked on in silence. Sir Charles was musing.

“Are you a Christian?” he asked suddenly.

“No,” the Chinese told him, “though I was confirmed at Public School—they made it part of the ‘course,’ as they did cricket and footer—and I took it all as part of the ‘English’ I was there to learn.” He added, but with absolute courtesy, “Are you?”

“I believe in God,” Snow said stoutly.

“So do I.”

“But not in our God, not in hers!”

“I think I do,” Sên King-lo assented. “I believe that there is only one God—many gods, but only one God. Does it matter what we call him? I think not. Or matter how we reach him? I can’t believe it. And, on my soul, I don’t believe that there is much difference between any two religions that are both sincere and devout.”

“Would you say that in China?” Snow demanded quietly.

“I hope so,” Sên King-lo replied, “if I had any reason to do so, to any one who had the right to ask. There still are parts of China, of course, in which it wouldn’t be altogether safe to whisper it even—not for a Chinese to do so—and in them I should not go out of my way to megaphone it. We have not, as it happens, spoken together about religion—Miss Gilbert and I; but I shall not try to convert her to any one of our old Chinese religions. I can promise you that. And they are crumbling fast. Christianity’s the coming religion of China.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I do,” Sên persisted. “And why not? It is an Oriental faith—as every great faith has been and is—from Zoroastrianism to Christian Science—Spiritualism thrown in, if you like, and the faith of the Friends.”

“Admitted. Well, I won’t pretend to think that religious difference is the principal bar. But tell me this, Sên: had your mother been living, would you have asked my cousin to be your wife?”

“No,” the other answered promptly. “I would not hurt my mother or deceive her.”

“Would you take an English wife to China?”

“No—I’ve thought that out, and I would not—not yet at least. The time is not ripe—but it’s coming.”

“I doubt it.”

“I intended to live my life out in China. Even the other day, I asked her if she would let me take her there.”

“You needn’t tell me what she answered. I know.”

“Of course.”

“She’d go like a shot and be infernally miserable after she had. The East is paradise for European women, unless they are married to Eastern men, and then it is hell.”

“Precisely. And that is why I shall not go back to China.”

“You always have wished to?”

“Intensely. But everything is changed now. A man’s work must go on, of course——”

“It should,” Snow interjected.

“And I may need to make flying visits now and then—sure to, I think—but she shall not come. England shall be our home.”

“That will be a sacrifice,” Sir Charles began.

“Yes. But I shall be glad to make it. I intend to make them all. And they’ll not cost me much—for that matter. They can’t, for—she is all the world to me.”

Charles Snow knew better than that. But he knew that Sên King-lo meant it, and he let it pass.

“Have you thought of your children? Yours and hers?”

“Desperately hard,” Sên answered, gravely. Snow had drawn blood at last.

“It will be worse for them than for her or for you,” he urged.

“It would be, in China,” Sên agreed sadly.

“Damnable!”

“Our children shall be English.”

“Half-English,” the other reminded him, “Eurasians!”

Sên King-lo flushed a little. His Chinese soul winced at that word. Snow had meant that it should. But he was sorry to thrust so at Sên King-lo, here in the room—Snow’s own room—where they had smoked so many “peace-pipes” and held such intimate and cordial conference.

Charles Snow saw that the other’s face was troubled now, but he saw no receding.

After a moment he rose and unlocked a drawer in a tall cabinet—the only Chinese thing in the room—and came back with a small oval thing in his hand. “No one but I ever has looked at it,” he said with one hand on Sên King-lo’s shoulder, “since the day it was given to me.” And he laid the miniature down at Sên’s hand.

Sên King-lo saw the face of a very beautiful Chinese girl painted on the oval of ivory, and painful color crimsoned his face.

“My mother,” he said huskily. For an instant his eyes were enraged.

“No,” the Englishman replied quietly, going back to his chair, leaving the miniature on the smoking-table between them. “Your mother’s sister. Her milk-name was ‘Lotus.’ ”

“The nun!”

“She was not a nun when I knew her,” Charles Snow said.

“I have seen your mother, too, Sên King-lo,” he added presently, “both as a girl in her father’s home and as a wife in her husband’s.”

“I never saw her!” Sên Ruby’s son said sadly.

“They were very alike—the sisters.”

“Very,” Sên agreed. “I have a miniature of my mother, here in my rooms, that might almost be this. My father gave it to me, from his robe, as he died.”

“They were painted by the same brush,” Snow told him. “I have seen your miniature, Sên King-lo. Their father trusted me, and so did yours.”

Sên gave his English friend a filial look.

“I am going to tell you the story. I thought it was shut away in my own keeping forever, but I am going to tell it to you—now.”

“If you’d rather not——”

“I’d much rather not. But I must. I am going to tell you what I’d far rather keep an old locked sweetness—a far away thing, but my own—going to tell it in my final attempt to save you and my cousin from the hideous mistake and life-long misery from which your grandfather saved me and his daughter years ago.”

The two children’s voices in happy clamor rang out in the hall, and their mother’s voice joined in, laughing.

“I have loved but two women, desired but two, in all my life, Sên King-lo.”

“I, only one,” the Chinese said gravely.

“You are young,” the older man told him, gently, a kindly twinkle in his blue eyes. “I love my wife very dearly, Sên——”

“I know that, sir.” And he knew also that, whatever this unexpected story which Charles Snow was about to entrust to him, there was no discredit in it—a perfumed breath of the long-ago, no slightest stench of any time or place.

Sir Charles Snow told it slowly—pausing again and again—striking a match, drawing a whiff of smoke from his cigarette. It is not easy for Englishmen to tell such stories at all.

“The second year I was in China, I spent two months in a monastery that lay on the edge of your grandfather’s place—a friend or two with me for part of the time, for the rest alone. The monks had an excellent cook—or one of them was—and a good bottle or two. They, good men, were no sour zealots.”

Sên King-lo smiled.

“I came and went as I would and did as I liked. It was liberty-hall for me, that old monk-kept inn, in the pines on the hill. There were no other guests. It was rest and peace and relaxation—perfect that—until I held a Chinese girl in my arms. Yes, King-lo, I have held a Chinese nun in my arms—and,” a queer, tender smile in his grave eyes, “your mother, too.”

But Sên King-lo only smiled back with a tranquil face.

“One afternoon I was squatted with a book at the edge of the pines, nearer your grandfather’s house than I was to the monastery, reading a little, doing nothing most of the time—being, not doing at all. The sun was setting—I can see it now. Looking up from a page—it was Han Yu, by the way—I saw a plume of flame lick up from the low, widespread, red-roofed house, and then—the day was very still—I heard a girl cry. You know what things of old wood most Chinese houses are, and how they burn if once they start.”

Sên nodded. He knew. All China knows.

“I ran, of course—no ceremony then between me and the devil-guards on a Chinese man’s forbidden gate. I pelted in and I carried two Chinese girls out—they didn’t weigh much, the pair of them. They were very like their pictures. . . . The servants ran about like tipsy rabbits and were of no possible use.”

Sên nodded again. He found that easy to believe.

“It turned out that all the men of the family were miles away—hunting. And my idea of what was best to do with those two little things in my arms was—well, hazy. I didn’t speak Chinese then quite as well as I did afterwards, and the gibbering servants knew no Mandarin. At least, if they did, they didn’t trot it out then, and their language was completely new to me. I didn’t quite know what to do with those girls. One giggled—your mother—” Sên smiled—“the other cried. Ivy’s laugh has reminded me of your mother’s sometimes.”

Sên looked at him curiously, but Snow did not bite his lip—propaganda forgotten—for he and his cigarette were far away, living again an old love-story. A song of Grieg’s came from the drawing-room. It was Ivy’s touch, Sên King-lo knew, but Charles Snow did not hear.

“So—I took them to the monastery. There was a small consternation, but the top monk cleared out of his cell, heaped it with the best things in the place—rugs and cushions and things—and there they slept. Their women were with them, and some score of the men servants and coolies jabbering and smoking outside, while I did sentry-go outside the cell door, and the fraternity told their rosaries and chanted their prayers half through the night.

“We lived there for four or five weeks—all of us, your grandfather and his four sons—a runner found them the next day, and they came hot-haste. The service I’d done wasn’t much, just carrying two little things kitten-light, and not much more than kitten-big, from under a roof that was blazing to one that wasn’t—nothing but that and keeping my head while a gang of ‘the babies,’ as your people call their retainers, completely lost theirs; but the father made a mountain of it Omi-high. Chinese gratitude is gigantic—always. We lived there together as one family, I as free of the two girls as their brothers were, and when a new house was run up near where the other had been—your grandfather made ‘the babies’ work like Egyptian slaves—he made me welcome there, and I was as free to go into the ‘flowery’ courtyard and garden as their own brothers were; and I did so very much oftener than they did. He could not have allowed any Chinese man what he allowed me. He held that the race-bar put me as much out of personal bounds—as far as his daughters were concerned—as if I’d been the man in the moon. They might have married a vase or a man dead and cremated; but they could not marry an Englishman, and the thought of such a thing could never arise. He was right, and he was wrong. So I stayed at the mandarin’s home rather more than I did at the monastery—sat in the courtyard with the tulips and musk while Lotus tweaked her lute and Ruby sorted her silks and ‘pulled the flowers up’ in the silk on her loom. They were very alike—so alike that some of the servants, and the brother who saw them least often, could not always tell them apart; but I always could. The lady Ruby had the prettier laugh—a tinkle of silver bells—carried her head the prouder; Lotus had the softer eyes, her hands were a shade the tinier, her mouth had the longer bow—and I had touched her hand by chance, as it lay on my coat the time of the fire, and once again when we’d reached on one impulse to gather narcissus that grew by the brook where the monks caught their breakfast trout. I learned more Chinese in those four weeks than I’d learned in two years. . . . The usual thing happened—to both of us. It was a dream—a courtyard madness. But I planned to keep it. And one day, by the lily-pond, I touched her hand again and told her. And her eyes answered me until they fell from mine, and then their lids answered me—they were trembling, and her fingers fluttered and answered me too. I knew that I should never return to England but stay always in China. . . . When I told her father—I went and found him and told him then, leaving her alone there by the lily-pool. . . . I never saw her again. When I told him, his amazement was terrible. He was kind—very kind. But he convinced me. He shattered my dream. He showed me the thing I contemplated as the monstrous impossibility it was. In my reason, I think, I thanked him even then. He saved two lives from misery and lasting regrets. I know it now. And I never look on my children or hear them at play that I do not thank him. I left Pechilli that same day. And I never have been there again. Two years later when she ‘took the veil’—I forget what it’s called in China—she wrote me a letter—her last day at home—out in the courtyard—a little red letter. Your grandfather gave it to me in Pekin. I have it still. I have not looked at it for years, but I have kept it. I do not know if she lives——”

“Yes,” King-lo said softly—there were tears in his eyes—“an abbess, happy and loved. I saw my aunt the last time I was at home.”

“Thank you. I am glad to know. . . . And your grandfather gave me that miniature. A great portrait-painter—the greatest of that day—a woman—had painted it and one of her sister for him, and they were among the few things that were not burned. An old blind servant had had the wit to snatch them, as he ran, knowing how his master valued them. This is the one your grandfather gave me. The other you have—I have no doubt it is it. Your father showed it to me. After your mother’s marriage, being in Ho-nan, I called on your father—your grandfather had asked me to do it. Sên Wo T’ring made me very welcome, and took me at once to your mother where she sat in her courtyard, working flowers on a tiny coat—her women about her. She sent them away and presently he left us—alone. I was there for an hour, and she gave me her hand and a rose for my coat—I’m afraid I haven’t it now—when your father went with me to the outer gate. He was a very gracious gentleman, your father, Sên King-lo. But he would not have taken me into his wife’s courtyard if I had been Chinese—or your mother have given me her hand and a flower. You were born, the next week. I never saw Sên Ruby again. But Sên Wo T’ring I saw often. Because of what your grandfather had told him, because I had carried your mother from a house that was burning, and, I think, because Sên Ruby had asked it, he held me his friend. And I held him mine and valued it greatly. . . . I want to stand his friend today, and hers, and yours. Sên King-lo, for the love of the dead, for the sake of the unborn, and in pity of them—give it up!”

“I am sorry,” Sên King-lo said earnestly; but his face was set firm, and Sir Charles Snow knew that he had failed.

“Shall we ask Lady Snow to give us some tea now?” was all he said.

“Not today, thanks very much,” was Sên’s answer. And they parted then with a grip of their hands.

Sir Charles Snow sat for a long time with the old miniature in his hand. Then he locked it away and went to romp with his children and chat with his wife until the dressing-bell rang.