CHAPTER XII

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

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

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

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

“I?”the knight she’d quoted demanded.

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

“Bless my soul!”Sir Charles muttered.

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

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

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

“Which?”

“Both.”

“He is not my idea of fun.”

“Nor mine,” Sir Charles added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ivy giggled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This time her husband did not expostulate or contradict.

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

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

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

Ivy giggled.

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

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

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

Ivy gave him a dagger look.

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

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

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

That was on Tuesday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nearer forty, I’d wager.”

“You needn’t tell me she can ride.”

“She can mount,” Sên insisted.

“Didn’t she crack your hand in two?”

“Went up like down.”

“Did she ride to hounds?”

“She rode towards them,” Sên stated guardedly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Glorious, isn’t it!”Sên answered.

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

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

“Why?”she asked quickly.

“I enjoy it more.”

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

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

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

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

She shook her head.

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

“Or languages?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Truly?”He asked it gravely.

“I’ve loved it,” she told him.

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

“I’d love it,” she answered.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where there is no vision the people perish.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XIV

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

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

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

She was glad to see him, and said so.

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

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

“But I could not forget to do that.”

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

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

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

“On occasions,” Sên admitted.

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

“Miniatured, I should think,” he interjected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Both!”Sên instantly lied.

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

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

It was.

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

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

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

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

“Very,” said Sên gently.

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

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

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

“I do not,” Miss Julia said sadly.

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

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

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

“I wish I had,” Sên King-lo replied.

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

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

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

“Oh, yes, I remember Miss Gilbert.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We are apt to meet.”

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

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

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

“Very much,” he told her cordially.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Humph!”Miss Julia commented.

Dr. Ray smiled at the carpet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

“What day?”

“When you rode together.”

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sên King-lo never had seen a Chinese girl!

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVII

Emma Snow took alarm first.

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

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

“Don’t be disgusting!”he snapped.

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Ray saw it next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not?”Dr. Ray demanded gently.

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

“Why not?”Dr. Ray insinuated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

That, the Chinese Minister did not state.

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rot!”Reginald replied.

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

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

“How?”He spoke gloomily.

“We must think.”

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

“You want to marry her?”

“Yep.” He rarely wasted his English en famille

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

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

“You’ve asked her?”

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

“When?”

“What’s that to do with it?”

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

“Plenty of times,” he muttered viciously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Stop it, I tell you!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reginald sat down.

CHAPTER XIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I love it,” Sên told her.

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

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

“Chinese kites,” he told her dully.

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

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

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

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

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

“Tum back to tea,” Blanche said generously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is a tempting day,” Ivy owned.

“Do come.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Sên King-lo only had laughed.

CHAPTER XXI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abraham Kelly bowed and backed and extracted his broadcloth dexterously.

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

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

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

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

“Impossible,” the lawyer told her tersely.

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

Kelly bowed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kelly bowed.

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXII

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

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

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

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

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

“You know that my brother cares for you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That is preposterous,” Ivy interrupted indignantly.

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

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

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

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

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

“Only that?”

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

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

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

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

“I do not know,” she answered truthfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXIII

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

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

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

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

Again today no groom was with them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reginald raised his whip, a little unsteadily.

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

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

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

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

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

He looked at her with a question in his smile.

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

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

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

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

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

“Chinese,” Sên said.

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

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

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

“I know that,” the girl said quietly.

CHAPTER XXIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sên spoke the Chinese word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then why—” she began.

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

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

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

“My——”

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

And then the girl knew.