“Ivy Ruby! How strange!” he said under his breath. And he stood for a time at the window looking out at the opposite house, and not seeing it. Seeing a homestead in China where the hollyhocks and persimmons that crowded about it were almost as gay as the roof of his birthplace, where the flamingoes filched coolness from the tiny streamlet where the trout were pinkest and sweetest—perhaps because of the tang of the citron and lemon trees that hung over it, and the musk and mint and verbena that clothed its banks, and the violets his mother had loved best of all flowers grew in their delicate millions—his girl-mother whom he had never seen, his mother, at whose grave his father had worshiped until he’d gone to her “on high,” his mother who had died that his life might come: a service of motherhood that gives a saintship of its own in China, where mothers not so set apart are loved by sons as mothers are nowhere else—a service that lays on a Chinese son a double duty and joy—and, too, sorrow—of worship and remembrance. His mother had been fifteen at his birth and her death. And her “milk-name,” the name her husband always had called her, and called her in his sleep till he went to her, was “Ruby.”

CHAPTER VIII

Ivy Gilbert had a far happier lot than a nursery governess can count on. But even so she was not quite as happy as it’s good for a girl to be, and not nearly as happy as she’d have wished to be. There were two things she greatly craved: personal happiness and travel—travel actual and social, to go far off the beaten paths, to see new, out-of-the-way places, to have new, uncommon experiences. She longed for both all the more and the more persistently because she thought there was very little chance that either ever would come to her.

She was actively unhappy, when she was, because she had so little to spend on clothes—it sounds raw and rough put so, but it is put truly—because she had fewer “good times” than most of the girls she knew, and (perhaps most of all) because she loathed the, in itself easy, work she had to do. No work is easy that we both dislike and must do. Ivy Gilbert was a very inefficient and a very discontented nursery governess.

In that good-natured society neither her comparative poverty nor her wage-earning in any way debarred her from such social place and power as a girl may have. And in America a girl may have much of both.

Washington is an omnium gatherum. All conditions of men and women, of all ages and of most sorts and most races circle about the White House. But it has its select set—the word “select” is its own, and need not be analyzed too closely. Ivy had its entrée. To the superficial few in it, who cared for and gaged such things in the wrong way, her undoubted relation to the British peerage “cut far more ice” than did the fact that she worked—or was assumed to—for her living; and that she lived with Sir Charles and Lady Snow and called them “Charlie” and “Emma” threw a very becoming garniture of ermine over her simple and not always very new gowns.

To do the girl’s own common sense and practical intelligence but scant justice, it was not the fact that she worked for a wage that was, she thought, her cramping detriment, but the shabby fact that she could not dress on anything approaching a parity with the girls who were her companions and friends. It was that that galled her. And she did feel that there was some ignominy in the small drudgery-way in which she earned her living. A people who boasted Emma Eames and cringed to Hetty Green could not consistently look too coldly on a girl who earned her living in a superior, if small, way; especially when every one knew that Lady Snow’s cousin, Miss Gilbert, could be presented at the Court of St. James any time she liked, if she were in England and had the price (of credit) of the train and feathers. And Ivy knew it. But she despised her own line of thrift—if others did not—perhaps a little because she followed it so lamely and sourly. Discontent often breeds shame. The English girl had been kindly treated by kindly Washington—handsomely treated, even, but she always had felt an outsider.

At home—in London—her own birth and environment had perched her more or less on a social fence. And in Washington her dress-skimp kept her so—at least in her own opinion.

Ivy’s maternal grandmother had been the daughter of an earl’s younger son. Ivy’s father had been a not too successful tutor at one of the great public schools. An uncle of hers was a bishop—Canterbury itself not too remote a possibility—another uncle was a wealthy cheesemonger; a third a briefless barrister. A cousin of her father’s was a bank manager in Surrey, a cousin of her mother’s owned and ran a rural inn, and his son a fashionable seaside hotel. She had a score of aristocratic living kindred, and others that belonged to the lowest middle-class, a few that were frankly “trade”—and retail trade at that. Her childhood had been radiant, her girlhood anxious. Mrs. Gilbert had been a woman of extraordinary ability, as had her elder sister, Mrs. Snow. While Ivy’s mother lived the wolf that yapped now and then not far from their door never got nose or paw in. Cora Gilbert could make a delectable entrée out of a bone and a bunch of herbs, a chic hat out of a yard or two of re-dyed ribbon and a card of safety pins; and she ruled her husband and ruled him well—and always she had a laugh, a smile and a gay, tender word for her man and child, and a handsome serviceable umbrella ready and waiting for the rainy day. But the mother died when the only child was scarcely fourteen; and then slowly but surely the wolf pushed in. George Gilbert was devoted and industrious, a rarely delightful companion—but he lacked the sense of proportion, was devoid of executive ability, had no mastery of detail, and he had one crass selfishness, one incurable vice. He lusted for books as its victim lusts for dope. There was not a second-hand bookshop in Westminster or Bloomsbury that did not know and welcome him. And before Ivy was sixteen more than one pawnbroker knew him well. He never borrowed, he never begged, above all he never grumbled or cringed. But he would buy books, new books and old books, big books and little, cheap and dear. And not with one would he ever part. They crowded the little home from half-basement to attic—and at his death, when Ivy was twenty, their sale at a shilling-a-volume average brought her more than nine-tenths of her heritage and the first really good gown she’d bought in six years. And though she had loved her father both tenderly and ardently, so aggrievedly had the girl resented the absence of joints and frocks for which their cost might have paid, that she grudged the sale of none of them and had kept for remembrance only three or four that he had prized most; and she had kept even them altogether out of a sense of filial duty and not in the least because she had cared to keep them.

In England she had never lacked for invitations and cordial welcome. But what’s the pleasure in that to a dress-fond girl who has next to nothing to wear? And Ivy Gilbert found more rasp than joy in favors and entertainment she could in no way return. Her rich and aristocratic relatives one and all liked her, courted her even. Her charming, dainty ways; her quick, if not deep wit; her radiant face; her exquisite voice, more than paid her way—if only she could have realized it—but she did not. Several of her richer kinswomen banded together to give the girl a good time—two of them offered her gifts of gowns and ornaments—and one of them, her godmother, and a spinster, gladly would have “dressed” and “presented” her. The good times she accepted now and then, but the gifts she would not have. Riding lessons, a very good saddle-horse and its keep, she could not resist when her godmother presented them on her fifteenth birthday; but that was the only breach that generous, affectionate Lady Kate ever was able to make in the girl’s pride. Pin money and chiffons, old or new, Ivy would have none. She had inherited her father’s adamant honesty. She loathed going without, but she would not sponge.

Friends and relatives of lesser purse and rank reached out towards her kindness and welcome as ready and cordial. But their simpler lives and homes attracted her weakly. From some old-time ancestor—perhaps one whose name she had never heard—Ivy had inherited an inordinate pride of race, an affinity with luxury and ease. Mayfair seemed to her home; Balham and West Kensington did not. Her own equivocal social place, the mixture of gentle and nobody in her veins, tried her sadly. She thought of herself bitterly as a sort of social mongrel. And she blamed and despised the grandmother who had refused a duke and married an architect of minor ability, less success and humble birth. The little leasehold home in which her father had died—safely settled on his wife at his wife’s own provident suggestion—became Ivy’s absolute property. She sold it at once. It little more than sufficed to pay outstanding and funeral accounts. Fifty odd pounds, a handful of trinkets, a shabby assortment of clothes she disliked, and her father’s absurd assortment of books, were all that she had in the world.

But she had no lack of friends—sincere and eager-to-prove-it friends. Several homes were offered her, and, incidentally, two not quite desperately ineligible husbands. She refused them all, and set her wits to work as to how they and she were to earn their living and hers. And Charles Snow—her mother’s sister’s son—and Emma his wife put their heads together to outwit Ivy’s. And where others, as ready but less skilful to befriend, failed the Snows succeeded—measurably.

They offered her a three years’ (and probably more) engagement in Washington and two hundred pounds a year. Ivy mocked and accepted. But she insisted upon naming her own wage—and from that determination nothing would budge her. “You shall pay me one hundred a year,” she told her cousin Charles, “and that is about three hundred more than I’ll be worth. I can’t dress, as a member of Emma’s family must be dressed, on a penny less; so you shall give me five fivers four times a year. I shan’t teach the children anything, of course—but they’ll be none the worse for that for a year or two. But I can mend and make for them—all but their smartest things, see that their faces are washed, keep them from falling into the fire or out of the windows, and, just perhaps, be useful to Emma now and then, and give you the pleasure of keeping me out of the wind and the rain. It’s good of you, Charles, and it’s more than good of Emma. And I won’t slap them—though I shall want to every day of my life. When do we start?”

They sailed in less than a month. The three years were more than half gone now, but none of them considered it a possibility that she ever would leave them except to go to a home of her own. Lady Snow hoped and planned that Ivy would marry, and Ivy herself frankly hoped so also. But as yet it had not been indicated to whom. She did her best to earn her hundred a year, and she had succeeded better than she knew: for both husband and wife had found her presence a help and a pleasure. She did indeed teach Blanche and Dick very little, and good-natured Emma rarely would let her do any needlework for them; but she kept them English, and she did both her cousins the hundred services that a younger sister might have done. She loved them both and she earned the love they both gave her. She shared Lady Snow’s pleasures, as far as a dress allowance of a hundred pounds a year enabled her to do without too stinging a flaunt of poverty. But five hundred dollars and an inherited deftness of eyes, fingers and taste did not go far towards adequate dressing in Washington’s smartest set. And she felt herself a godmotherless, pumpkinless Cinderella; and she loathed it by day—and dreamed by night of—glass slippers.

Lady Snow would have “loved” to dress her young cousin; but did not dare even suggest it.

Miss Townsend’s warm friendship had been both a personal boon and a social asset to the not-too-contented English girl. It stood for a great deal in Washington. The half-aristocrat in the girl thrilled and was grateful to the entire aristocrat of the old Southern woman.

But it was not enough. She envied other girls—not what they were, but what they had—and, because of what they had, where they might untrammeled go, what they might untrammeled do. She realized how generously and gladly good her cousins were to her. But she felt that a degrading smirch of “service” clung to her, as the smirch of restricted means clung to her garments. “I Serve” was not Ivy Gilbert’s motto, and—because of the plebeian strain in her veins—she had no sense that of all mottoes it is the highest and proudest. She felt her life dull. She was ripe for adventure.

Sên King-lo’s violets had done more to reëstablish her in her own raw esteem than all Miss Julia Townsend’s warm friendship. From resenting those innocent violets, she abruptly came to value them because two feather-headed girls with great purses at their service had so envied her them. Sên King-lo—a Chinese—had put her on her feet. Her attitude to him was not altered, not modified. But she was girlishly, if cheaply, elated to have what other girls wished for and schemed for and couldn’t get. She did not place the violets more conspicuously in her room when she went down to it, it never occurred to her to tuck a few of them in her belt when she changed for dinner. But she threw them a kindlier glance as she tidied her hair. Perhaps she ought to say some sort of “thank you.” And the next day, after church, she did. She wrote Mr. Sên a note. She wrote merely:

It looked wrong, she thought, as she scanned it. And after a little consideration she rewrote it—leaving out the word “Yours,” and writing her Christian names in full. The initials had looked curt. One didn’t say “Thank you” curtly—if one said it at all.

She posted the note herself when she took Blanche and Dick for their Sunday afternoon stroll.

She wondered if he’d reply to her note, and ask if he might call. She hoped not. But she’d not mind Lucille and Molly knowing it—if he did.

Sên King-lo did neither. She met him again at the Ludlows’. He did not ask her to dance—though he danced several times. She was sincerely grateful that he did not. But he sought her out, thanked her for her kindness in writing—and in accepting—his posy, and chatted on until a partner claimed her.

She noticed that Mr. Sên danced exceedingly well and that his evening clothes suited him.

CHAPTER IX

“Charlie,” Lady Snow said to her husband, almost a month later at dinner, “I made a new acquaintance today at Mrs. Ransome’s, and—I don’t know what you’ll say—I asked him to call.”

“You usually do, don’t you?” Sir Charles commented. “Why should I waste words over so invariable a habit, my dear?”

“I certainly like to know people—what else is there for me to do with you shut up all day over your silly papers?”

“I do not doubt you would find them so,” Sir Charles admitted dryly.

“We both were lunching there. I found him interesting—different somehow from any one I know. My new acquaintance is a man, did I say?”

“Quite unnecessary—but you did.”

Emma Snow laughed. She plumed herself on her “affairs,” and lived in desperate hope that some day one of them would attract her husband’s attention sufficiently to wean him a little from his dense absorption in the “silly business” his country paid him to attend to—and incidentally had knighted him that he might do it the more effectively in a country that proclaimed its scorn of all such fictitious honors, but at the same time received them with very marked favor and attention.

Sir Charles went stolidly and attentively on with his very good dinner. His wife raised her eyebrows—and led trumps—at least she hoped that it would prove she had.

“A perfectly charming Chinaman, Charlie.”

But Sir Charles neither dropped his knife nor spilled his claret.

“Most of them are,” he told her. “This canvas-back is a great improvement on those we had last week. But the sauce needs a dash more cayenne and more than a dash more lemon.”

“Do you like the Chinese?” Ivy asked him quickly.

“Very much,” he replied. “Every one does who knows them. They’re the salt of the Eastern earth.”

“Have you known many Chinamen—well?” Reginald Hamilton asked his host a little superciliously.

“I lived ten years among them,” Snow replied curtly. “I was sent to Pekin when they first let me pass my Civil Service Exam. And I wish they’d left me there. But after ten years—for my sins—they promoted me—to Geneva! Yes, I have known many Chinese—some of them fairly well. The more you know them, the better you like them: bound to. By the way, Emma, ‘Chinese’ is a better word, more descriptive, I think, and better taste than ‘Chinaman.’ There is one Chinese in Washington I very much want to get on easy terms with.”

“To Scotland Yard special-branch him?” his wife quizzed him.

“Never mind that part,” her husband retorted.

“Mr. Sên told me—” Lady Snow began, but she never finished her sentence.

“Was it Sên King-lo you met at Judge Ransome’s?” her husband demanded, putting his glass down untasted. Emma Snow had aroused her husband’s attention at last—very much so.

“Yes—it was,” she announced importantly, “Mr. Sên King-lo. I asked him to call.”

“Good!” said Sir Charles heartily. “I hope he does.”

“Sure to. He promised,” Emma Snow said confidently. Charles had not taken her small news as she’d intended him to, and had hoped that he would. But she was gratified at the mild excitement she’d caused. She’d hoped Charles would be annoyed—but, since he was not, it was the next best thing that he was pleased. It was his indifference that rankled—and indifference was his constant everyday wear.

“He’ll leave his card—some day when he knows you’re out,” their guest observed. “It is one of his affectations. He’s a bit of a jackanapes, if you ask me.” No one had, or had thought of doing so. “And he usually does. It has gone to his chink head the way he’s run after in Washington, D. C.”

Sir Charles Snow crumbled his bread viciously, but he took no other notice, for Reginald de Courcy Seymour Hamilton was their guest—though what possessed Emma to tolerate the fellow, let alone invite him, was more than he could understand.

Lady Snow had her reasons. They were not ungenerous ones—and they were distinctly feminine.

“By the way, Ivy,” she said, “you met Mr. Sên at Miss Townsend’s, he told me.”

“How did you like him, Miss Gilbert?” Hamilton spoke before the girl could answer her cousin.

“Miss Townsend likes him immensely,” Ivy replied. “I have only met him twice—very casually.”

“Cracked, isn’t she?” Hamilton said pleasantly. “Haven’t met her, though, myself.”

“And are never likely to,” Sir Charles and his cousin said promptly—to themselves.

“But, by George, he sent you flowers though, didn’t he? I heard so. I’d forgotten that. Perhaps he will call when you are at home after all, Lady Snow. I’d live in hopes,” Hamilton said in a tone that made Sir Charles Snow’s right foot tingle. But Emma Snow had little attention to waste on any one but Ivy now.

“Sent you flowers, Ivy?” she cried excitedly. “You never told me. When?”

“I don’t put every nothing in my diary,” Ivy said indifferently, not troubling to lift her eyes from her plate.

“But did he?” Emma Snow insisted.

Her cousin smiled coldly. She was furious at Reginald Hamilton; she didn’t know why.

“Did Mr. Sên send you flowers, Ivy?” Sir Charles asked.

The girl looked up then, looked at him in surprise. The question was unlike Charles Snow.

She had ignored Emma—had been on the point of saying, “Why not get any details you’d like from Mr. Hamilton? He seems particularly well informed.” But she would not put her cousin Charles off, or answer him flippantly—she liked him far too well.

“Yes,” she told Sir Charles, quietly. “Mr. Sên sent me a handful of violets one day. They were beautiful violets.”

“I wish I’d known that!” was Snow’s astonishing comment.

“Whyever why?” his wife cried.

“Have you, as well as Japan, designs on Shantung, Charlie?” Ivy demanded, with a laugh into his eyes.

“Heaven help us!” the knight retorted. “Who’d have thought you’d ever heard of Shantung. I wouldn’t for one. That is a development! Are you thinking of standing for Parliament, Ivy, when we go home? Or of investing in a Cook’s ticket to the grave of Confucius?”

Sir Charles meant nothing by that, and Ivy Gilbert took nothing personal from it. Indeed, she did not know where Confucius was buried. A number of people in Christendom do not. And yet few bits of earth so small have wrought more of human history, human letters, human thought. And the centuries to come and the peoples of the future yet may veer and swing to that pivot, a crystal-tree-guarded grave in Kuifu.

Reginald Hamilton certainly did not know where the bones of the old Sage took their long rest. But he shot a look of impudent question at the English girl. She did not see it, fortunately; nor did Sir Charles. But Lady Snow did. And she wished they’d change the subject.

“I am not,” Ivy told her cousin. “Neither. I teach your children geography!” she reminded him with nipping coldness.

“Do you?” he shot back at her. “You surprise me more and more. Emma,” he turned to his wife and said, not jokingly, “I think, if I were you, I’d write Sên King-lo a note—see that you get his name right—I’ll show you how to write it—and ask him to dinner. I wish you would.”

“Of course I will, dear.” The wife was delighted. Charlie did not often back up her social activities, or much care who came to dinner or who did not, so long as his dinner was good and he was not expected to interrupt it with too much small talk, though he certainly preferred the did-nots to the dids. Lady Snow was very pleased.

Ivy Gilbert was not.

“I think,” she said clearly, “I’d wait first, and see if Mr. Sên did call, Emma.”

Husband and wife looked at her in blank surprise, and they crossed a question to each other’s eyes. Never before had any one heard Ivy Gilbert veto any wish or command of her cousin Charles.

“He promised to call,” Emma Snow said haltingly.

“Then he will call!” Sir Charles pronounced. “A Chinese word is the best bond on earth. I’d take it before A-1 at Lloyd’s any day of the week.”

Reginald Hamilton said nothing—though his big black-brown eyes sulked, and, to Lady Snow’s relief, the subject did drop then.

Reginald de Courcy Seymour Hamilton sounds an English (not to say aristocratic) name—but it wasn’t. At least its supporter was neither. He did not even hail from Boston or—to drop down the social and intellectual ladder very far—not even from New York. San Francisco could not claim him, and New Orleans would not have owned him. He had been born in Chicago and still ornamented that village-city of inordinate mixtures when he was at home. What he was doing in Washington nobody knew, unless he did, which was improbable—for no one had ever known him to do anything anywhere except to take the very greatest care of his person and clothes, and to spend as much money as he could contrive to wrench from relatives—and others. He was very handsome; a little too plump, a little too smiling; but undeniably handsome, and his clothes were many, costly and very beautiful. He spoke with what he flattered himself (or perhaps one should say flattered it) was an English accent—when he remembered to do so—which was a matter of fits and starts, that made the prettiest patchwork of his speech. A sentence that started off with the broadest of a’s often ended off with a few pronounced as the alphabet’s first letter is in rain and in bank. No one had ever seen him without a flower in his coat—except at funerals—and oftenest it was an orchid. There was little harm in the fellow—unless intense love and over-valuation of self be evil. The worst thing about him was his parents. That is true of many of us. He hadn’t a penny capital—of his own—but he had a sybarite income (though it fluctuated) and large prospects.

His father was a sensational Baptist clergyman who had made, and contrived to hold, a meteoric “hit” in Chicago. Chicago likes character—even pseudo-character. Of the latter the Rev. Joseph Hamilton had and to spare. There were Chicagoans who thought him an abomination, some who held him both a fraud and a nuisance, many who thought him a joke—and Chicago loves its joke. But his congregation adored him—more than perhaps men should a man—a congregation of shrewd business folk—wealthy, most of them, many of them with heads as hard as the shell of their adamant creed. To catch and to keep the affection and the respect of such men would seem an accomplishment of nothing less than genius. If that is true, Mr. Joseph Hamilton had a touch of genius—of a sort. He was as thin as Reginald de Courcy Seymour promised to be plump. His voice was as sharp and hard as Reggie’s was soft and creamy. His delivery was wonderful—more “dramatic” than would have been tolerated on the Surrey side of the London stage. He fancied his sermons. And those who carped at their quality could not gainsay their quantity. He fancied his “letters” even more. His people gloated over both. Old men who had burned and shivered over night at his diatribes, went downstairs in their pyjamas (or more old-fashioned sleeping raiment) on Monday morning to snatch the Times, Inter-Ocean or Tribune before any one else could, and to reread the wonderful discourse before they shaved and descended to cornbeef hash or fish-cakes or spareribs and buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. He had been convicted of plagiarism more than once. His congregation didn’t accept the proven fact. Gage him, sum him up any way you will, he must have had magnetism—a magnetism that only some felt—others it repelled. The wife of his bosom (the word is but a figure of speech—they both were more than flat-chested, each was concave-breasted—Mrs. Hamilton the more so. She scooped in alarmingly, for her hips were wide and her bones were big, and she did not pad. She was far too proud and far too moral to do that) was less popular than her husband—even in their own church. Beyond it she was little known and less courted than known.

Mr. Hamilton earned—that is, received—a very large salary, and earned almost as much more with his pen, or, as some nastily said, the pens of others, and not a little by lecturing and publication in book form of both sermons and lectures. Mrs. Hamilton had a very rich and not ungenerous bachelor brother, a Chicago publisher, a straightforward, sterling man who had ability, if you like, for his country school-going had been brief and scant, and from a business start as clerk at two dollars a week in a Peoria bookstore he now was secure in a fortune of seven figures. Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton had two children—Reginald and Emmeline—and no one made any doubt—unless the millionaire publisher did—that Reginald and Emmeline Hamilton would prove their uncle’s sole heirs. Certainly it never occurred to his sister that her brother might rob them by leaving anything to her over their dear heads. The Hamiltons were devoted to their children and admired them intensely. To be fair, both Emmeline and Reggie loved their parents very much, and were proud of their father.

Reginald Hamilton did not intend to “hang about waiting” for his uncle’s fortune. He intended to amass any number of solid gold flecks of it as he went along, but he had no mind to wait for dead men’s shoes. From very youthful days he had determined to marry (and manage) a great deal of money. The lady must be beautiful, accomplished, highly connected—that above all—but she also should be really wealthy.

And that was what the younger Hamilton was doing in Washington. An English girl with a courtesy title he rather fancied, or a Countess, or Princess of one of the old Greek or Latin families. “Mr. Reginald de Courcy Seymour and Lady Edith Hamilton,” that would stir Chicago, he thought. And so it certainly would! Reggie was no renegade—he liked Washington, he liked to twinkle in the capital, he intended to “do” Europe, and to do it in luxury and elegance, but he had no other thought than to shine permanently in Chicago. His determination to select—he had only to select—a rich and aristocratic wife never wavered or slacked until he fell in love with a penniless nursery governess, whose own family tree was as variegated as a Cheyenne dance-hall.

That he had fallen in love with Ivy Gilbert he as yet only half suspected. But Emma Snow knew it perfectly, she knew all about his rich uncle Silas, and in her British innocence she supposed that Reginald had a solid bank account of his own. And hence her welcoming and more of young Hamilton that had so puzzled her, in some things, dense-pated husband.

CHAPTER X

Sên King-lo called upon Lady Snow, called when she was at home, two days after the night that Reginald Hamilton had caused Sir Charles’ right foot to tingle and twitch under the dinner table.

And a week later Sên King-lo dined with the Snows. Again they, at dinner, were a cosy party of four. Lady Snow had wished to make the occasion a function, but Sir Charles had asked her to do nothing of the sort. And he had asked Ivy to make a point of dining at home that night. Neither woman thought of refusing to do as he asked. They both loved him too well—and his requests were too infrequent to be resented or callously disregarded. And Ivy was unaffectedly indifferent whether she dined at home that night or not. If she had dined almost tête-à-tête with Mr. Sên King-lo at Rosehill, she could do so at Emma’s. And that Charles had spoken as he had of the Chinese had made more impression on her than Miss Julia’s warm laudation of Mr. Sên had. Charles was a man. He had lived in China. He reasoned and thought. Miss Julia was only a woman, and felt more than she reasoned—“guessed” more than she knew.

“I shall make a ‘grand toilet,’ even if Charlie won’t let me make it a grand dinner party,” Emma Snow told her cousin, as she gouged her spoon into her breakfast grapefruit. “You can dress as much or as little as you like, Ivy. Mr. Sên will scarcely expect an unmarried girl to be gorgeous.”

“After several Washington seasons!” Sir Charles said dryly. “Dress as much or as little as you like—both you girls—so long as you don’t undress too much. That always puts a Chinese off—even one who knows that with us it merely is virtue unabashed.”

“Don’t you be indecent,” his wife cried sharply. “I’m sure my gowns never are.”

“I don’t see that yellow thing you wore on Tuesday taking a prize at a Quaker meeting-house,” her husband retorted quietly.

Emma dimpled. So Charlie had noticed a gown of hers for once!

“Wear something friendly looking, something home-like, as fine as you like, but nothing of the fireworks order, to put a man off his food. And be friendly. That’s all I ask.”

The two women stared in surprise.

“Perhaps you’d like to look through my rags, and tell Justine which to lay out for tonight?”

“It might not be a bad idea,” Snow replied.

“Well!” Lady Snow gasped. “Would you like me to have a few Chinese flags in the drawing-room?” she demanded. “And the table decorated with red fire-crackers?”

“I would not!” she was told. “For the love of Mike, be good tonight, Em!”

“I wish I knew why you care so much,” she pouted.

“My dear,” he assured her, “you wouldn’t understand a word, if I told you all about it. But I have my reasons, of course. I want Sên King-lo to feel at home here. And I want him to come again.”

“Silly old politics!” the wife said scornfully. But her eyes danced. Probably Charlie would let it be a big dinner-party next time.

“Precisely!” Sir Charles confirmed. “Silly old politics.”

It took Ivy Gilbert longer than usual to dress for dinner that night. She had so few evening gowns that it took quite a time to decide which she would wear. The white, she thought at first, because the self-satisfied Asiatic had said how little he cared to see women wear white. But no, that would pay him too much attention; and, after all, she was not dressing for Sên King-lo, she was dressing for Charlie. The green georgette was out of the question. It was very much the color of that linen thing she’d worn at Miss Julia’s, and to repeat the color he’d proclaimed Chinese might indeed seem to pay him too much attention. It would have to be the gray or the red then. The gray was prettiest. The red suited her best and was freshest.

She hurried her hair, and glanced at the clock. Heavens! how late it was! That decided it. It would have to be the red. The gray took at least fifteen minutes and the loan of Justine to get into properly. She could dash into the red in no time at all—just over your head and it went on by itself. She dashed into the red, caught up an ornament or two that suited it—a couple of garnet bangles the children had given her on her last birthday—and two inexpensive but picturesque hair ornaments, and ran down the stairs, wishing she’d thought to find out what Emma had decided to wear—not pink, she devoutly hoped. Emma wore pink oftener than she did anything else, and this red thing of hers and any one of Emma’s half-dozen pinks simply would squeal at each other—ran down the stairs, and almost ran into the arms of Sên King-lo: a small social catastrophe his presence of mind courteously avoided. But it had been a very near thing.

They went into the drawing-room together; he quite at ease; a small flame in each of her cheeks, brought there by an odd smile that had crossed his face as he saw her in the well-lit hall.

The English girl did not know that the vivid red of her new evening gown was the exact shade that every Chinese bride wears. And it was some months later that Sên King-lo told her so.

CHAPTER XI

When changing for dinner Ivy—a little cross from an unusually hot schoolroom friction—had thought to herself, “It will be a sort of lantern lecture on China—a lantern lecture with the slides left out, I suppose. I wish Charles hadn’t made a point of my dining. Lucille would have jumped at coming, and Emmeline Hamilton would have groveled to Emma for the chance.”

But China was not mentioned at dinner. And long before the sweets Miss Gilbert had forgotten that her cousin’s guest was not as European as they three. His quiet repose was more English than Reginald Hamilton’s broad vowels—and so were his manners. And she began to realize why Miss Julia so liked Mr. Sên, and why Sir Charles had so welcomed him. He was a sunny, considerate companion, as free from “side” as he was from servility. He talked most to Lady Snow, of course, but he glanced oftener and longer at her cousin; and his hostess saw that he did.

Sên King-lo thought the girl friendlier and more interesting than she had been before, and he thought that tonight she looked almost more Chinese than she had done at Rosehill. The rings of garnet and enamel that dangled in her dark hair, and moved with her head, had more than a look of stick-pins, and her dark eyes almost were almond-shaped. He liked that stick-pin look, and the gentle constant movement in the girl’s dark hair. But he made no mistake. He knew it as accidental as the bride-red dress she wore tonight, or the jade-green and the dangling pepper baubles had been. Of a race that sees little of women who are not belongings, or detrimentals, or peasants, yet Sên made few misjudgments of women. He knew why Miss Hamilton wore peacock feathers and dragon embroideries and Japanese jewelry that she believed Chinese, and—like half the girls in Washington just now—clattered as she walked, with the noise of bangles she believed to be jade. But he sensed that this girl was virginal, had dignity, and thought her own the super-race; all three qualities which he liked. He did not agree with her as to which was the super-race. But he liked her for her own conviction; he thought it a womanliness.

The table-talk was general, of course—only the four at the small round table—and it was most of it impersonal. But it was interesting talk, Ivy thought, and she rose a little reluctantly when Lady Snow rose. Ivy was sorry that dinner was over.

Sir Charles Snow was not. “Don’t expect us in the drawing-room quite as soon as is best politeness,” he told his wife. “I particularly want to pick Mr. Sên King-lo’s brains, and a secret or two, if it can be done.”

Sên King-lo’s eyes sparkled good-humoredly. “I shall try to be picked very swiftly,” he said to the girl as she followed Lady Snow through the door he held. “To Hecuba, Sir Charles,” he bade his host as they reseated themselves. “My brains are at your service, and my secrets too, if I’ve any that are mine only—but I’m afraid I haven’t.”

“I lived in China a number of years,” Snow said, pouring the port, “as you probably did not know.”

Sên laughed. “But, of course, I did. We have a list—a fairly accurate list, I fancy—at the ‘shop’ of every official, and of every one else worth watching, in Washington now, who has been in our country, or has interests there.”

“To be sure! I might have known that. But, I don’t suppose you know anything about what I did in China—it wasn’t much, and you were the merest child then, still smelling of your mother’s milk.”

The Chinese face quickened at the other’s use of a Chinese saying. Then it grew graver, and Sên said a little sadly:

“We have to grow old rapidly now, we Chinese who love our country, and wish to serve her. I know what year you landed in China, what boat you took there, how long you stayed, much of what you did, where you lived and went most of the time, who many of your Chinese friends were. And that was one reason—only one—why I was so particularly pleased when I received Lady Snow’s note, kindly saying that I might dine with her and make your acquaintance—for I don’t suppose we count as acquaintance the few k’o-tow nods we’ve exchanged at your ‘shop’ and mine.”

“No—precisely,” Snow agreed. “Well—as you know then, I must try not to feel too flattered by what is purely a bit of detail work of a painstaking patriotism, you know that I have lived in China all told quite a lump of moons——”

“A year and seven weeks longer than I have myself—all told.”

“By Jove! You have been exiled as much as that?”

“Yes,” the Chinese said gravely.

“Well, Mr. Sên, a man knows his own country better—certainly more naturally—than any foreigner can. But you and I know that the old myth that no European can know anything very vital about China, or the Chinese, or understand either at all, is untrue.”

Sên King-lo nodded and smiled across the cigarette he was lighting. “Tommy-rot,” he said.

“Parkes knew China—quite a good deal about you—and Hart did, and Macartney.”

Sên King-lo nodded again.

“And there have been others.”

“And there have been others,” Sên King-lo said. “And there are now—a few. We need more.”

“I hope you’ll get them,” the host said cordially. “But if you don’t, I expect you’ll make shift without them.”

“I hope so,” Sên replied. “But it will take longer to accomplish what we must.”

“Much longer,” Snow added. “Next to my own country and people, I like and admire and trust yours, Mr. Sên.”

The Chinese lifted his glass. “And next to my own country and my own countrymen, I like and admire and trust yours, sir,” he said, and drank.

“When the Manchu fell,” Snow began when he, too, had tasted his port,—“frankly I wish they had not——”

Sên King-lo smiled. “We all regret—some more, some less—that they had to, all of us who love self less and China more, I think. But it had to come.”

“Possibly,” the other conceded. “I don’t own that I see it. But we need not quarrel over that.”

“We shall not quarrel over anything,” Sên said simply.

“No, I don’t think we shall. Well—I hope that the Manchu may come back.”

“Why?” Sên King-lo asked.

“Best dynasty you ever had. And I don’t like republics. Don’t believe in them. And for an Oriental people—well, in my opinion they smell to heaven.”

Sên King-lo laughed. “Do you think the Manchu was a good dynasty in its last reigns?” he questioned.

“I do,” Snow said stoutly. “It gave you the two finest rulers any country ever had—any country, bar none.”

“You mean K’ang-hi and K’ien-lung.”

“I do.”

Sên King-lo smiled again, but he drained the glass Sir Charles had refilled.

“Twenty Sun-Yat-sens would not out-balance either K’ang-hi or K’ien-lung. And I hope the Manchu will come back. And I don’t like dethronements.”

“We’ve had a good many in China.”

“Not exactly. Conquering princes and warriors have mounted, usurped, if you like, the throne of the Emperor they’ve unseated—but that’s a very different thing from a people voluntarily dismissing their ruler. And when they do it at foreign instigation and chicanery—to my mind it is without excuse.”

“Mencius taught ‘Killing a bad monarch is no murder,’ ” Sên remarked.

“Then Mencius was, to my thinking, a bit of a Bolshevik,” Snow retorted.

Sên King-lo laughed pleasantly. That he did—at such hot derision of the Sage, showed how tight Young China had gripped him, how far Old China had lost him.

“I hate to see China a republic,” Snow insisted. “And I stand by the Manchu. You will dislike my saying that——”

“And that is why you say it.”

“Exactly. I want to start fair.”

“So I thought, Sir Charles. But I do not dislike your saying it, or even your feeling so. I think you are wrong,” Sên King-lo inclined his head courteously towards the older and host, “but if a man himself is thoroughly sound, I don’t think that it matters very desperately what views he holds. I believe that neither an incorruptible man, nor any views he has, will do himself or any one else much harm. For our weal or our woe, the Manchu has gone—for a time, or for ever—and we, we Chinese, must do the best we can for our country, with things as they are. And we can’t very well import an Emperor made in Germany.”

“God forbid! But you could choose one of your own.”

“Would you have us crown Sun-Yat-sen?”

“That’s the last thing I’d have you do,” Snow retorted grimly. “But there are men—good men, in China.”

“Yes,” Sên King-lo agreed, noncommittally. “You have started splendidly fair,” he added with a pleasant grin, “and now you wish to ask me something?”

“Yes; that was why I wouldn’t let my wife have half Washington here tonight. I wanted a chance to talk with you alone—to find out several things from you, if I could. You won’t tell me, of course. Your Minister won’t, and you, of course, cannot and should not; but I might gather something from the way your reticence shaped—I’m an old hand, you know.”

The young Chinese laughed gleefully. He liked this Englishman.

“Shantung?” he asked, gravely.

“No—not Shantung. I know what you and every decent Chinese wish and plan and hope concerning the sacred province. I wish it too, Sên King-lo.”

“Thank you,” Sên said quietly.

“I’d like to know, if I might, how you—you individually—believe that China’s regeneration may best be brought about. You’ll pardon me the word?”

“I use it myself,” Sên said gravely. “I believe that the foundation of China’s new strength and health must be financial. Her greatest and sharpest peril is financial—most specifically from her use of foreign money, and from foreign financiers’ misdealings with her. That is why I am keeping so long an exile, Sir Charles. I am studying European and American banking methods.”

“May I ask to what end?” Snow’s face was aglow.

“We—many who think as I do—are earnestly anxious to see every bank in China entirely in Chinese hands; entirely, adequately, exclusively capitalized by Chinese money and securities.”

“By God!” The table rang under the blow of the Englishman’s hand. “You’ve got the right end of the stick. By the holy Harry, you have! Accomplish that, and you’ll accomplish everything.”

“So we think.”

The two men smoked in silence for several moments. Then Sir Charles spoke quietly.

“I wonder if you know what my Chinese holdings are?”

“Almost to a yen, I fancy. I certainly know that you are a rich man in China. And, too, that you never have parted with a Chinese security, except to buy another, even in our country’s darkest hours.”

“I never have. I never shall. Yes, I’ve a good deal salted down in China—a great deal more than I’d like Lady Snow to know. She has a rare taste in diamonds and no mean liking for lace and other chiffons.”

Sên’s eyes twinkled. “I’ll betray no yâmen secrets, Sir Charles,” he promised.

Snow waved that aside. He knew that. Nor did he think it worth while to remark that no confidence of Sên King-lo’s would ever be even impinged on by him. He was right; it was not necessary. They understood each other.

“You want only Chinese capital in the banks of China, and no control that is not Chinese.”

“None; neither a yen nor a man; Chinese capital and Chinese shareholders only, and Chinese management and service, from the managers to the ‘boys’ at the doors and the coolies who clean.”

“Precisely—but I daresay you’ll accept foreign depositors well accredited and sifted, and foreign customers?”

“Of course. Every civilized banker accepts any good account that is not an enemy account, and buys and sells to any who can pay his charges. We’ve no scheme to run freak banks. The heyday of the freak is waning.”

“I hope so,” Snow said—but with a touch of dubiousness.

“But we—we’ll accept foreign accounts, not court them. It is Chinese money, Chinese-owned, that we shall aim to attract.”

“Such a Rome will not be built in a day,” the Englishman told him.

“Nor in too few years,” Sên agreed.

“I’d like to be among your first depositors,” Snow said slowly. “I’ll tell you what I am going to do, Sên King-lo; I’m going to hold all I have in China at your disposal. I’ll throw it in as securities—I’ll float it into cash, and deposit it en bloc, when your national banks are ready—and I’ll deposit as well the interest you pay me—we’ll call it a ninety days’ deposit—say until Dick, my youngster, is thirty; that gives you a fairly good run, if you get your shutters up pretty soon—and I’ll bind myself and my estate to make no withdrawal, little or big, after that, without giving you very long notice, and, as well, I’ll hedge you well about against my doing so—or my heirs—at any time of special inconvenience to the bank. All I’ve got will be just a drop in the bank bucket, of course, but even drops come in handy in times of drought. My Chinese holdings are at China’s service. And the execution of a good, all-Chinese banking scheme would be the best service of China I can think of. I’ll do a bit more than that: I will sell you—your bankers or your nominee or nominees—any or all holdings of mine in your country, and sell at a minimum price, whenever you feel that you are strong enough to stand alone—and see us get out. I’d like to be one of the first to get in—into your banks, and I’d like to be the last European to get out. But I’ll hold myself pledged to go when you say, ‘Go.’ ”

“I wish you owned Shantung,” Sên King-lo said tersely.

“I wish I did!” Snow replied. “In the meantime,” he continued, “if you care to avail yourself of a little foreign capital, during the expensive and more or less experimental preliminary months or years, I’d be glad to have you use mine. It’s at your service.”

The Chinese are said to be unemotional. It is not true. The upper classes—at least the men—carry self-control to an obsession, and have made it a fine art; but high or low, there are no stolid Chinese. To a man their emotions are quick and extreme.

Sên King-lo made no reply. He looked both imperturbable and nonchalant, sitting easily there in his perfect Western attire, carelessly turning a cigarette in his fine yellow fingers, his eyes on the tiny cylinder with which he toyed. His face did not change in any way. But he did not look up—because his eyes were a trifle humid.

“You offer to take a large risk,” he said at last, “a very unusual risk. You know nothing of me. And what if the Manchu, or some other dynasty, did come back? We are scheming and looking towards a republican national bank. Had you thought of that?”

“Of course I had,” Snow asserted. “It is up to China to decide her own affairs. I’d like to see the Manchu back, but I’m not in any way out for it. If you enjoy your Republic—well, it’s up to you. On the other hand, if the Manchu should come back, they’d destroy no good thing that you or any one else had done for their country. It isn’t their way. They might make you grow a few queues—but their revenge wouldn’t go much further than that, I’m thinking. And, as for my not knowing you, don’t be too sure. We have an Intelligence Department also, however pigmy it may be compared to yours. But, frankly, no, I do not know much of you. You are a youngster. Whitehall has not got its eye on you—yet. May never have. I do not know you. But I claim to know your race and your caste.”

“We have no castes in China.”

“Nonsense; there is caste everywhere—from Patagonia to Greenland. And—I know your family. I knew your father slightly. I knew one of his brothers better. I knew Sên Wang Yat very well indeed—your father’s second cousin, wasn’t he? I do not need to know you. I know the Sêns.”

“Thank you,” the guest said quietly. But he looked up now, and his face was not expressionless. “But—it is extraordinary—what you offer. I wonder why!”

“And you’d like to know! I believe in China’s future. I believe your bank idea is sound—the soundest! I am fond of China. I like your people. Those are four of my reasons. I have one other—a sentimental reason. Some day—just possibly—” He broke off and struck a match.

Sên showed neither surprise nor curiosity. He felt neither. That a diplomat and, as he knew, also a keen politician, should prove to be, too, an idealist, was not very common, but as he knew as well, it was not particularly rare.

He liked Snow none the less for it. All Chinese are idealists.

That this man “wanted something” in return never entered Sên’s mind. He was not a bad judge of men.

“I was anxious to have you here, rather en famille, because I wished to learn, if I could—even a hint or two—several things that I’ve no doubt you know. Well, I am not going to pump you tonight, but I hope you’ll come and see us as often and as informally—just drop in, you know—as often as it does not bore you. I hope it, no matter how completely I fail to make the pump work.”

“It will not bore me,” Sên told him. “It will delight me, if Lady Snow—and Miss Gilbert—will allow me.”

“Oh, that’s all right—shall we go to them now? You’re a great success with the ladies, I’ve heard it whispered.”

Sên King-lo made a merry and contemptuous shrug as he rose. “Yes,” he said, as he opened the door for his host—Old China had not lost him quite!—“Yes—I am quite the fashion.”

“I was almost asleep,” Lady Snow asserted with a pretty combination of yawn and grumble, as the two men came in. “Come, wake me thoroughly up, Mr. Sên.”

“With pleasure,” he told her.

She made a pretty picture, her husband thought, in her draperies of peacock-blue and apple-green—how much had they cost? he wondered indulgently—and a discreet swarm of about half her second best diamonds—he knew perfectly well what they had cost. And Sên King-lo proceeded to amuse her gaily and devotedly. But she saw his eyes sweep the room.

“Where’s Ivy?” Snow demanded.

“Coming back,” his wife told him. “She said so.”

Some time passed before Ivy did. She had a book in her hand then, and she carried it to Sên King-lo.

“Will you write in my confession book, Mr. Sên?” she asked.

“May I?” he said as he rose to take it.

Charles threw his cousin a cordial glance. She was a good girl. She’d thought of that to please him he was sure.

And Sên King-lo thought so too.

They were right—but more wrong than right. For herself Ivy Gilbert had no wish that Sên King-lo should write in her confession book. But she knew how it would excite Lucille and Molly, and how they’d enjoy it and chatter about it. And that chiefly was why she’d trudged upstairs and down to get the vellum-bound volume.

“Shall I write in English or in Chinese?” Sên asked her.

“In both, please—use two places.”

“I shall obey,” he promised. “May I take it away with me? One needs preparation and prayer for a supreme literary effort.”

“Of course,” the girl nodded.

“Is your own in it?” Sên asked her.

“One has to set the ball rolling,” she answered.

“May I look?” He turned to the first page, as she nodded.

“What perfectly soul-scouring queries!” he jibed. “No, I shall not study your revelations of your utmost self until later,” he announced, closing the toy. But the quick Chinese eyes must have caught one question and answer, for he said, “So riding is your favorite pastime, Miss Gilbert. Do you often ride here?”

“Almost never; Sir Charles hasn’t often the time to take me. Lady Snow’s lazy, she hates riding, and I hate riding alone—with only a groom to follow.”

“I wonder,” Sên replied, “if—after we are older friends, Lady Snow would allow me to ride with you some day, Miss Gilbert? And I very much wonder, if you’d let me? Miss Julia Townsend says she’d ride with me, if she were younger, and I have driven her several times in my dog-cart, without a groom.”

“I’ve no doubt Miss Julia would ride with you in a balloon—if you wished it,” Miss Gilbert said severely.

“Happy thought!” Sên retorted. “Shall I ask her?”

“Let me be there when you ask her,” Emma Snow giggled.

“Let me be there when you go up,” was Sir Charles’ request. “She’d go all right, I’ve no doubt of that. She’s a splendid sport.”

“She’s a delightful, wonderful woman,” Sên King-lo added. “Will you let me take you, Miss Gilbert—if Lady Snow will allow me?”

“In a balloon?”

“Not for worlds,” Sên declined; “on a horse. I have one that would carry a lady perfectly, Lady Snow.”

“The chaperon’s as dead as Queen Anne,” the young matron said. “And Miss Gilbert is one of the new dispensations.” She spoke lightly, cordially even—but her husband shot her a puzzled look. He knew—he knew every tone and tint of her voice so well—that for some odd reason Emma was not pleased.

“I am not!” Ivy asserted coldly. “I despise them.”

“Will you—ride—some day?” Sên persisted.

Ivy flushed. “I am teaching most of the time, Mr. Sên, or trying to,” she told him.

“Nonsense! And untrue!” Lady Snow cried. “Don’t dare to pretend you are not at your own perfect liberty all the time. My cousin helps me—when she wishes—with my kiddies. You must see them, at lunch, some day soon. They are dears. But Ivy is as free to junket as I am—freer—and she’s a little cat to pretend she isn’t. It’s one of her affectations—just to tease me. And you need not lend her a mount—we have quite a decent one, she and I, between us, just eating his head off—a groom has to give it enough exercise to keep it on its legs. I never ride except when my husband takes me and makes me, because it’s one of the things I do not care for at all. And Ivy won’t—because she’s contrary. But Wolf carries her perfectly. So——”

“So—perhaps—some day—Miss Gilbert will give me the pleasure,” Sên King-lo said, and dismissed it. For he saw that Miss Gilbert had no wish to ride with him—and he himself cared very little either way. He turned to Sir Charles to speak of something quite else, but Lady Snow spoke before he could.

“Do you ride much?” she asked.

“Fairly often,” he told her.

“Have you ridden with Mrs. Gunter? I think no one here rides as well as she does—no one I’ve seen.”

“No,” Sên said. “I have ridden to hounds in England, but, except for that, I never have ridden with any lady. Here I have a quick canter by myself, sometimes at daybreak.”

“How perfectly awful!” his hostess groaned—quite sincerely. “At daybreak! Mr. Sên, how can you?”

“We are all early risers—we Chinese,” he told her.

The sudden red pulsed into Ivy’s face. She was angry that it did—but she turned to Sên King-lo, and said impulsively, “When will you take me for our ride, Mr. Sên?”

“Whenever you will let me,” he answered quietly, with a slight, grave bow. He showed no surprise. But he was surprised, as her cousins were. They both were gazing at her in almost open blank amazement. Ivy rarely changed her mind.

Again Sên King-lo made no mistake. He could not imagine the cause of her volte face, but he was perfectly sure that it was not that she wished to ride with him. And because she did not wish to, he regretted that he had suggested it—or she consented.

“Next Thursday?” Ivy persisted. “But you won’t ask me to be ready at daybreak?”

“Next Thursday. Thank you so much,” he replied. “The hour you prefer will give me the greatest pleasure.”

“Ten, then; before it is hot,” Ivy decided. Lucille often rode at ten.

“Come to breakfast, Mr. Sên,” Lady Snow said cordially. “We breakfast at nine.”

“You are very kind, Lady Snow,” Sên replied. “I will not be late.” But the invitation had pleased the Chinese man as little as it had the English girl.

“Play to us, Ivy,” Sir Charles asked presently, not because talk was flagging—it wasn’t—but because he particularly liked his young cousin’s music. But Ivy would neither play nor sing.

“You’ll have to put up with mine,” his wife told him. “When Ivy says she won’t, she won’t,” and went to the open piano. Emma Snow played brilliantly, far better than their cousin, if not so sweetly as Ivy did. Dress was not Lady Snow’s only talent. She had several, veiling them serenely under a radiant frou-frou of chiffons—that she did so, not, perhaps, the least of her talents.

“Your turn,” she bade Sên as she rose. “I know you do. You do everything, don’t you, Mr. Sên?”

“Not nearly,” he assured her. “Is Beethoven your favorite composer?” She had played the Moonlight Sonata. “Or what shall I play for you?”

“No,” she answered. “I just happened to play Beethoven—at random. Play something you like best.”

He chose Grieg.

Ivy wondered if he had seen her favorite composer, as well as her favorite pastime. One was just above the other in the confession-book. She wished she’d never brought it downstairs.

He had not. Sên King-lo had as little inclination to initiate a flirtation with Miss Gilbert as she had to with him—even, possibly, a little less. He deemed flirtations even more vulgar than she did—and he had no ambition to excite jealousy in Lucille, or in any one else, and no sore, young desire to prove himself, in spite of poverty and schoolroom bondage, no social failure.

If he had seen, or known, that Grieg was Miss Gilbert’s favorite composer, he would not have played any music of Grieg’s.

Grieg was Sên King-lo’s favorite composer.

Soon after that he told them goodnight. He bowed to his hostess without offering to shake hands. But Lady Snow held out her hand to him, and then Miss Gilbert could but do the same.

Sên King-lo took her hand in his deferentially, but more lightly, less lingering than she was accustomed to have men do. Yet—as he did—from some indefinable thing in his touch—it flashed across her thought that that slim Chinese hand might not after all give a feeble account of itself at fisticuffs.

Sir Charles Snow went to the outer door with Sên.

“The celestial dragon, smoothly as a swan, carry your honorable person on high!” Snow said.

“May lotus flowers grow from the honorable bones of your distinguished ancestors!” Sên King-lo replied. “And may your honorable grave be soaked with the tears of an hundred sons.”

“Heaven forbid!” Snow exclaimed.

Then they both laughed and shook hands, and bade each other an English goodnight.

“Well—cheerio. So glad you could come.”

“Jolly glad I could. Thanks awfully. Cheerio.”

The East and the West get within hailing distance, at least now and then.