Sun and moon

CHAPTER XV

The visits of Hai t'ai-t'ai were always occasions of intense importance to the family, and the woman, growing frankly elderly at the early age of thirty, played her part with such pomp and independence of manner as effectively to inspire awe in the hearts of her needier relations. Much largess depended upon her smile, and all except her old mother, who reigned haughtily like an autocrat now that her father was dead, crowded round the t'ai-t'ai with many questions of concern for her welfare and the health of her body.

The headquarters of the family were in a town some miles south of Peking, a place of dust and sand, with streets worn far below the level of the doors. Like all these villages on the flat plains of Chihli, it was subject to relentless alternation of flood and drought, so that the people were perennially close neighbors to starvation. They took the fortunes of the weather philosophically, sowed crops of millet, beans, sorghum, and wheat against the gamble of rain, gossiped over the salt water they drew from alkali-tainted wells, and congratulated themselves if famine seemed no nearer than a year away.

Into this land, making a doomed resistance against the desert which the winds each year brought closer and closer, the t'ai-t'ai went gladly. She did not sigh for the extravagance of mountains, even with tempting glimpses of the Western Hills shimmering above the mirage of the horizon. She sat with utter contentment in the dirty hallways of a huge ramshackle home, all decay and discomfort behind pretentious walls, and thought nothing strange of reducing Nancy to this, giving her pigs and chickens, mangy dogs, slovenly women, sprawling brats for lifelong society, courtyards reeking with the stench of manure for her window upon the joys of the world.

Her news caused great excitement. Fifteen thousand taels was a large sum; remarkable was the crop of prodigies who sprang up to claim it. No one, of course, suggested his own sons. In a land where smallpox and typhus and cholera were the normal hazards of the day, five sons were not too great an insurance against being left without heirs; even the likeliest boys died suddenly: one day, active and grimy good health, the next day, a stomach ache and the coffin. An indiscreet fondness for melons could mow down whole harvests of children. No one quite took it upon himself to offer up even the youngest of his sons as a husband for Nancy. They were all sure to claim their share of the fifteen thousand taels, no matter whose son secured it; the ingenious communism of a Chinese family guaranteed this hope. Why be too forward in sacrifice? Every father regretted the stupidity of his own offspring, extolled unselfishly the superior talents of his nephews and cousins.

Finally the t'ai-t'ai lost patience.

"Bah! if you found lumps of gold in your fields you would complain about the rockiness of the soil."

Prodded by her vigorous scorn, they stumbled upon the happy thought of asking her to suggest Nancy's suitor.

The next few days were busy ones. The t'ai-t'ai visited all branches of the family and hauled up the sheepish youths to answer her questions. Seldom in her life had the t'ai-t'ai been in such fine fettle; she was as racy, as outspoken as a dowager of twice her winters and paid back arrears of jealousy and spite in the sarcasm she poured out so freely upon the offspring of the relations who once used to slight her. There was not a likely candidate, she vowed, not one whom Hai Lao-ye could not quash with a single stern glance from above his tortoise-rimmed spectacles. What stupid optimism their parents showed to bring up this generation to be gentlemen. They would gape open-mouthed at a ricksha and fall headlong from the windows of a railway carriage when the fire-wagon lurched forward. Better, far better, to teach them to curse mules and make them competent donkey-drivers; how could a full stomach go with an empty head, long nails with an open mouth?

The t'ai-t'ai's abuse was accepted without resentment. It was so impartially distributed that everyone had the chance to grin at the discomfiture of his neighbor. Her sarcasm was the privilege of success. The woman held the whip hand over her kinsfolk in her right to dispose of fifteen thousand taels. There was none among them who would not have asked the same interest from his capital. At the bottom of it all, they knew she was observing and when she decided they were ready to acclaim her decision for the t'ai-t'ai, after much sifting and searching, gave her choice to a boy who was undeniably the ornament of the family.

He was the son of an older brother and had surmounted the handicaps of a mother untaught, a home ignorant of hygiene, a family in which no one hesitated to trespass on the privacy of others. As though these were the conditions necessary to producing his type, he had grown up, like so many Chinese youths bred in the same unpromising way, a tall, sturdy, clear-complexioned boy, with quick, intelligent eyes, high forehead, slender, masterful hands.

She had the lad suitably clothed, brought him to Peking with his father, installed them both in a hotel, and then informed her husband that Nancy's match had been found. The account she gave of his talents would have done credit to the ablest scholar of the Han-lin.

"He must be a relative of yours," sniffed Herrick skeptically.

"He is," acknowledged his wife. "Why should I prefer the treasure whose value I have known only by hearsay when I can bring the treasure I have tested in my own home? He is my nephew, so I can vouch for him."

"Well, I am content to look at this paragon, though I heard of no unicorn being present at his birth. Your father was a man of great parts; perhaps it's not impossible some of his ability may have strained through to his grandson."

Herrick waited for the father of the youth to call. The visit was promising. Herrick had known the t'ai-t'ai's brother in days past and was pleased to see him ripened into a dignified, well-spoken man with the easiness of manner which characterized training of the old school. In due time the son himself was produced. Herrick noted his face and his bearing, summoned every resource of his own knowledge to examine him as to what he had learned of the classics, made him write characters, interpret scrolls. The boy stood the ordeal well. Every question that was put to him he answered in a quiet, collected voice. He looked soberly handsome in his dark green jacket and long green gown. He did not shift from foot to foot or twist his hands or venture to stare at his inquisitor.

"I am glad to see that he has been taught the proprieties," Herrick said—the first mark of satisfaction he had shown.

The engagement of course was not settled in a day. It was too grave a business for such haste. The birthday cards had been exchanged and the eight characters on each of them compared, to make sure that the year, month, day, and hour of Nancy's birth matched those of Ming-te, the t'ai-t'ai's nephew. The t'ai-t'ai was too wily a contriver to be balked by a little detail of soothsaying: the making of Nancy's card was in her own hands. So well she managed it that Chou Hsien-sheng, the father of the boy, was astonished at a mating the stars themselves seemed to have predestined.

Yet Herrick was loath to bind himself to the final bargain. He was satisfied with Ming-te, quite confident that no better Chinese husband could be found for his daughter; nevertheless, the businesslike dryness of arranging betrothal for a girl so instinct with delicate imaginings disheartened the father, made him sore in spirit. He had specified that Nancy should not be married for four years, a point he had some trouble winning, for the fifteen thousand taels were not to be paid till the wedding; to gain his will here, Herrick had to concede one third of Nancy's dowry at her engagement. But after all the terms had been talked out, the amount and number of betrothal presents decided, every obstacle cleared, Herrick still hung back, for he knew when the red cards were exchanged he should have given up irrevocably his claims upon his daughter.

"I wish Nancy could see the boy for herself," he told the t'ai-t'ai. "I know my own judgment is better than hers and that I ought to do this without a qualm—yet my heart does not feel quite right about it."

For once in her life the t'ai-t'ai could not control a vivid expression of her feelings. She was appalled by her husband's vacillating temper. After all the concessions she had made as matchmaker, after allowing Herrick not only to see the father of the boy but the unprecedented privilege of seeing the boy himself, her patience was outraged by the mere suggestion of his turning back.

"Of course she can't see him. How can she see him? When has that ever been done?" she demanded.

Herrick agreed sadly. It was another case of his own inheritance betraying him. He had fancied Nancy and Ming-te left by themselves for a space, till the gentle influence of the garden should help them realize their own community of soul. Alas, it was the fond picture of an old man. He needed only a minute's attention to his wife's protests to know that neither Nancy nor Ming-te would see the advantage of such a meeting. They would stand awkward, tongue-tied, wondering who should release them from this agony of embarrassment.

"Very well," he said, "the matter is settled. Call a fortune-teller and choose a lucky day. I am ready to make the engagement."

The t'ai-t'ai secured a lucky day close at hand. It was cheaper, after all, to buy a lucky day than to pay the hotel bills of her brother and her nephew.

Herrick, meanwhile, had not dared consult Nancy about his negotiations. The t'ai-t'ai naturally told nothing. It was in her interest to be secretive, especially about the matter of the fifteen thousand taels, which every concubine would resent as robbing her of her chance, no matter how remote, to plunder the family wealth. Yet the news of the intended engagement leaked out. Every last woman of the household knew who Nancy's husband was to be. The nurse was angry, yet afraid to make matters worse by protesting, afraid lest she be parted from her foster children and pensioned back to her southern home, a summary fate she knew the t'ai-t'ai had hinted and might have influence enough to effect by making Herrick believe he was doing a kindness to an old and loyal family servant.

Kuei-lien too was perturbed. So great was her admiration for the shrewdness of the t'ai-t'ai that she could not rest comfortably till she had uncovered all the inward reasons for this engagement. The t'ai-t'ai was not the person to give away a favorite nephew without compensation, not the one to argue her family into a profitless bargain. She suspected money behind the agreement, but could get no proof; it was certainly what she would have claimed, had she been in the t'ai-t'ai's place. Yet she, no more than the amah, could presume to act against the mistress of the household, to act openly. The t'ai-t'ai was her patron; had lifted her up, might yet cast her down.

Kuei-lien determined to provoke resistance from Nancy herself.

"Do you remember when you suggested to your father that I was an enemy?" she began, with engaging frankness. "I want to prove to you that I am no enemy, but a friend."

Nancy, who was quite unable to fathom the purpose of the concubine, chose the prudence of keeping quiet.

"I suppose you know your father is seeking but a husband for you," she continued. "He tried Mr. Nasmith; they couldn't come to terms. So now your father thinks it is cheaper to get a Chinese husband."

"Who told you all this?" Nancy asked angrily.

"Ah, my dear, the very walls have ears."

"I don't want to hear the tattle of the walls."

"Come, there's no profit in being angry. Let me finish what I have to say. Now your father has found a suitable person. He is the nephew of the t'ai-t'ai. Why do you think the t'ai-t'ai has offered her nephew for the place? Because she is fond of you? Nonsense; it is because her family is poor and needs the money your father is willing to pay."

At this moment the nurse herself appeared; Kuei-lien had contrived it so.

"Now," went on the concubine, "perhaps you dislike me too much to believe me, though I am not the enemy you think,"—her smile truly was disarming,—"but you surely will believe your old amah, and you will see that she agrees with every word when I say we Chinese do not like marriage with foreigners just as your own people look down upon marriage with Chinese. Isn't that so?"

"Yes, yes, very true words," assented the nurse.

"Why did you marry a foreigner?" asked Nancy.

"I am not a wife. I am only your father's mistress. I was poor. I had no choice."

Kuei-lien, flinging back Nancy's own words, had shamed the girl into silence.

"The family of your husband won't welcome you," persisted the concubine; "they will receive you, only because of the money you have brought, but they will hate you, hate you; no matter how talented or how beautiful you may be, they will hate you because you are different, they will hate you even more because you are talented, because you are beautiful. What do you suppose your ignorant mother-in-law will care about your talents? Faugh! she cannot read a word or write a character. She will never rest happy till you have forgotten every sentence you know, till you too are like the other cattle of the house."

"Suppose all this is true," said Nancy calmly, "what is the good of telling me? My father makes the decisions."

"We tell you because we can do nothing with your father. The t'ai-t'ai would send us away if we opened our mouths to protest. But you have your father's ear. The t'ai-t'ai cannot harm you. If you make your father understand what this engagement means, he would love you too much to bring such shame upon his daughter. Go and see him. According to your Western custom you have the right to speak about these things."

"I know nothing about Western customs," Nancy replied, "but I do know this: my father hasn't sent for me and he hasn't asked my advice. There is nothing I can say till he asks me."

As soon as she had made the two women realize that she was not going to lift the littlest finger against a fate which was not yet real to her mind, Nancy escaped to join Edward and Li-an in the garden. October sunshine glowed lazily through the trees, striking silky lights from the cobwebs. Nancy sat down in the little summer house which seemed to brood with her on the coming loneliness of winter; she kicked her feet through the crinkly leaves and looked at the bright borders of the chrysanthemums which tossed their curled petals like a rainbow of flame around her. She had wanted to stay like this forever—forever—yet now had come this new, unwanted intrusion to prove the rightness of her father's words.

"What is the matter, Nancy?" asked Edward, as he and Li-an came in and stood beside her. "Why don't you come and play?"

"I am going to be engaged."

"So am I," Li-an joined in proudly. "Just as soon as you're betrothed, mother's going to find a fiancé for me."

"Yes, we all have to be engaged," Edward agreed, "it's nothing to cry about. Perhaps they'll have a feast."

"Why do you say such stupid things, Edward? You never think about anything but your stomach. Do you think I have to be engaged just so you can stuff yourself? I hate you."

"Don't you really want to?" asked Edward with concern.

"No, of course not."

The boy was taken aback by his sister's willingness to forgo an occasion of such promising excitement. But Nancy got rid of Li-an and told her brother all the dreadful prophecies Kuei-lien had made. Edward had never thought of an engagement in this light.

"I'll go see father," declared the boy. "I'll tell him you aren't ready to be engaged."

Nancy, despite herself, smiled at his unconventional daring, but she did not stop him. It was an act Edward never before had thought of doing, to go thus uninvited to his father's room. Yet no prudence deterred him, no thought of hesitation even came into his mind.

"And what do you wish, Edward?" asked Herrick, who was sitting at his desk. He always derived tender amusement from the animated, serious ways of his son.

"Does Nancy have to be engaged now?" asked the boy, plunging into his subject with an Occidental directness for which there was no explanation except the blood in his veins, loyally Western despite all the sages of China. "She doesn't want to be engaged."

"I don't want her to be engaged either," replied the father sadly, "but time takes these affairs out of my hands."

As if to prove the truth of his statement there came suddenly the long blast of a trumpet, the lilt of wind instruments like the festival sprightliness of bagpipes, then a tremendous explosion of firecrackers, long strings of them bursting with redoubled noise in the confines of the hallway.

"You hear," indicated Herrick with a weary gesture. Time had indeed taken the affair out of his hands.

The father paced restlessly up and down the room while the noise continued. Edward's curiosity impelled the boy to join the crowd of women and servants gathered in the courtyard. The t'ai-t'ai had kept her secret so well that only the father had been prepared for the coming of the betrothal gifts, only the father had been allowed to see the trays of return gifts got ready in an outer room of the house.

Amid the smoke and turmoil of crackers six pairs of coolies entered, each pair carrying between them a red wooden tray laden with bales of silk and cotton, with rice, with round pears and balls of steamed bread, and with dried poultry on which had been pasted double characters cut out of red paper to represent the word for happiness; there were eggs too, dyed red, and slippers of silver paper. The overslung handles of the trays had been festooned with garlands of red cloth.

All the middle doors had been flung open so that the coolies could bring their hampers into the inner courtyards, while people from the street mixed with people of the household, thronging the pavements despite the belaboring curses of the gatemen. The t'ai-t'ai, who wore resplendently a skirt of scarlet brocaded satin, stood beaming with importance, ready to receive the gifts and to dispatch Nancy's in return. The consummation of arduous diplomacy was symbolized by her sedate manner, the dignity which no Chinese woman is too humble to reserve for the few great public moments of her life.

But she had to share the haughty fruits of the occasion. A gasp from the women standing round caused her to turn and to see Nancy, who of all people in the world had no business to be there. Already, in noisy undertones, the women were commenting upon Nancy's immodest presumption in coming out so brazenly to receive her betrothal gifts when she ought to be hiding in some adjacent room, pretending ignorance of the festive proceedings. Nancy did not hear them, did not seem to mind the asperity of the t'ai-t'ai's voice, when the reason for her being there was demanded.

"This is my betrothal, is it?" the girl asked.

"Yes."

"And these are my betrothal gifts?"

"Yes."

Nancy stooped and looked at the contents of the trays. There was no limit to her unmaidenly boldness.

"Very nice things they are," she commented, "and where are the things I am to send?"

The t'ai-t'ai could not speak; she merely indicated with her chin the other trays which had been brought from the gate. The girl walked round them slowly, looked with a meditative gaze on the articles which had been heaped upon them, then very deliberately took two of the large golden chrysanthemums she was carrying and placed them on top of the foremost tray.

"I want one gift to come from me," she said.

CHAPTER XVI

After Nancy's departure, the ceremonies again could take their appointed course. The firecrackers blazed and snapped, the little horns, with voices like thin piping clarionets, again commenced their weird din, the trumpets blew; away went the trays, with Nancy's own bright gift, to the home of her future husband. Now came men who wore scarlet sashes, to bring the large red document revealing in its eight gold characters the celestial ordinance beneath which Ming-te had been born; two others took away with them Nancy's eight characters, putting her destiny eternally into the keeping of her betrothed.

In these things Nancy took no part. She returned to the garden and listened to the exulting turmoil with ears that understood its meaning less than the resonant whisper of the pines. The flowers, nodding together their many-colored heads, made her homesick for the mountains and summer sunshine. She wondered where her poor token would go, her golden-hued chrysanthemums, her one small effort to ask pity and love from a youth she had never seen. Would those unvalued blossoms come by some extreme chance to his eyes and tell him that she had sent them? No, he would not see the flowers; they might have fallen bedraggled into the streets; he could see only the gaudy, costly things, the silk, the cloth, the slippers, things the t'ai-t'ai had got ready without any reference to her. He had sent her no token, no sign, just inanimate rubbish. And yet it was this cold stranger who was receiving the precious eight characters, the red cards Nancy knew with a superstitious shudder were being taken away like some virtue gone out of her.

Nancy contemplated these matters with a gentle bitterness. From years back this hour had been inevitable; perhaps she had been spoiled by its having been so long delayed. She could not complain, but her heart was sad, filled with foreboding of that second more sinister hour when she must be locked into the scarlet bridal chair. When that hour should come, whether soon or late, she had no clue. But she was betrothed; it must come in the end. She must walk now a straitened path, never again to see Elizabeth and Helen—or Mr. Nasmith, never again with the heart to fling cones from the high branches of the pines upon her laughing, vexed brother.

Winter came; the garden was parched and bleak. When the children went out to play in the cold dry sunshine they wore thickly padded garments which transformed them into stuffed dummies, a misshapen caricature of the cool clean limbs and lithe bodies that had made the pine tree their own kingdom in July.

Nancy accepted her lot. She got great comfort in learning by an indirect message from her father that there was to be no marriage for four whole years. Much might intervene in four years, so she did not demur at the new task of sewing for her trousseau; after the first shock it became like any other sewing and the boy a shadowy, almost legendary, figure only vaguely able to threaten her happiness from a distant horizon.

Herrick alone was morose. He had regretted the engagement before it was made; afterward he regretted it more. He lost sleep. The peace he had hoped to buy became more elusive than ever because all the time Kuei-lien was torturing him by little subtle ironies upon the life to which he was dooming Nancy. Her words came so innocently that the man never guessed the intent behind them. He did know this: that he was a prey to nightmare, to dreams in which Nancy's mother and the amah and Nasmith all were inextricably mixed, the one burden of their tongues and their eyes being the evil he had done. He was becoming a haunted man, and no matter how desperately he might fight to preserve his wits, to keep his mind and his strength for the sake of his children, there was a point beyond which flesh and nerves could not endure; he gave way with a crash, like the rending of a great tree, and for days offered himself to Kuei-lien to be trampled on.

When he emerged, everyone in the house knew that he was a sick man. He did not regain his poise with the old alertness, did not even struggle to regain it, but lay back, shaking, infirm, afraid to move lest he provoke one of his terrible spasms of the heart.

"You are killing him," protested the t'ai-t'ai to Kuei-lien. For so many years she had been used to Herrick's moderate indulgence in opium and kao-liang spirits that she had not realized her husband's self-control could relax with such speed. A hale and hearty old age anyone would have predicted for Timothy Herrick, yet here was death written on his face.

The t'ai-t'ai had not prepared for this. She could not afford to let Herrick die now, with Nancy unmarried, the ten thousand taels undelivered, worse than all, Herrick's fortune, of which no one knew the exact amount, locked up in that mysterious, impregnable place, the English bank, whence only Herrick's magically written slips of paper could draw forth the silver stream. The woman, of course, knew nothing of law or banking practice; of her own accord she would not have trusted a copper behind the brass grille of a bank. If Herrick died, she feared every cent he possessed might be taken out of her grasp. She could not write checks; even for Nancy's dowry she had no security. Her only hopes were to marry Nancy while her father lived and to persuade him into transferring his wealth from inaccessible bank vaults to the tangible form which had served her forefathers, into gold ornaments and pearls, and ingots snugly buried in the garden.

"You are killing him," she warned Kuei-lien. "A man of his years cannot stand these excesses."

"Oh," said the concubine, with a touch of insolence she had never shown before, "do you credit me with being the mistress? If my master commands, what can I do but obey? His is the will, not mine."

The t'ai-t'ai opened her ears at this tart remark. She looked narrowly at Kuei-lien, wondering whether this last and least of her husband's concubines were using her favor to rob an infatuated man. The shrewd suspicion entered her mind that Kuei-lien was utilizing these frenzies of sordid passion, when Herrick's senses were bemuddled, to extract money from her master, to extract those formidable little slips of paper.

"Well, you may rest for a while. Your master is too sick for excitement. I will look after him," she said.

Kuei-lien nodded and withdrew.

"I shall have to send her away or sell her," thought the t'ai-t'ai. "This kind of business can't go on."

She took rigorous charge of her husband, put him in bed, administered homely Chinese medicines, refused to let anyone see him. So languid was Herrick's mood that the man acquiesced, only complaining in an occasional peevish sentence because Kuei-lien had not come to see him. During the stupor which possessed him the t'ai-t'ai found it easy to get his keys and she pulled out the check book in which she had seen him write. It had been his habit to draw out limited sums each month, giving the checks to be cashed by an old and recognized servant. The woman took the book, looked at the stubs crosswise and upside down, but could make neither head nor tail of them. Finally she sought Edward's help.

"Your father is not well and wants you to help me with some business," she explained. "Will you read what is written here."

After some confusion between the numbers of the checks, the dates, and the sums, Edward found the gist of the story the stubs told and soon was able to translate the monthly record, "To cash, such and such a sum," "To cash, such and such a sum," while the t'ai-t'ai noted the figures in her memory. Then appeared what she suspected, checks for sums she had never received. They began in the summer and continued through the autumn. She had Edward repeat them again and again till the figures were printed indelibly on her mind.

The t'ai-t'ai pondered this new problem at some length. She was quite certain that Kuei-lien could not have cashed checks for such large amounts without enlisting the help of her husband's old messenger. This faithful man had been associated so invariably with the process of getting money that the woman had come to believe his participation was an unalterable step in the procedure. He was not the man to be bribed in a day; the t'ai-t'ai was reasonably certain of his honesty. The probability then was that Kuei-lien still held the checks and was waiting a favorable chance to exchange them.

When once the t'ai-t'ai had reached this conclusion, her first impulse was to call the concubine to her husband and in her absence to search every corner of her boxes, every corner of her room; if this failed, to summon two strong servants, strip the girl, and search every article of her clothing. It was probably on her body that Kuei-lien would carry the checks.

"I should have to sell her after that," the woman decided.

Second thought, however, was more deliberate, not from any pity for Kuei-lien, but because there certainly would be scandal; the story would reach Herrick's ears—the t'ai-t'ai could trust her enemies for that—and no one knew what vengeance the man might exact, in his weakened, peevish condition, for the loss of a favorite concubine. Even this the angry woman might have risked, if the thought had not occurred to her that by making terms with Kuei-lien she could use the wiles of the concubine to get even larger sums from her husband, to get the money he always laughingly had insisted was safe, into the only safe form the t'ai-t'ai recognized, the safety of good, tangible silver. Yes, the concubine was worth winning over; she could do this; she might even persuade the old man to allow an earlier marriage for Nancy.

The t'ai-t'ai went to Kuei-lien's room and found the concubine seated cross-legged on the k'ang, the brick oven which served for divan and bed. She was smoking cigarettes, her incessant habit. At the t'ai-t'ai's entry, however, she jumped up, brought her mistress to the k'ang, and only after repeated urging by the t'ai-t'ai consented to sit on the warm rush mats beside her. There was much desultory talk during which the older woman searched Kuei-lien's appearance with keen eyes to see if she had acquired any unusual jewelry; Kuei-lien was fastidiously dressed, rather daringly, with short full trousers barely topping a startling length of cerise stocking, but there were no signs of jewelry. This was some evidence that the checks had not been cashed. Finally, when the time seemed ripe, the t'ai-t'ai became more direct in her speech. She had steered the conversation to the subject of Herrick's ill health.

"It is a pity he will go to these excesses," Kuei-lien agreed. "I can do nothing to stop him when the passion comes over him. Hai—at times I am afraid. He becomes like a madman and strikes me if I try to take his opium pipe away."

"Does he ever pay you for these blows?" asked the t'ai-t'ai shrewdly.

Kuei-lien winced a little.

"Oh yes, he pays me," she laughed, "pays me with bruises. I will show you my back; it is black and blue."

"He pays you with nothing more substantial?"

"Not even a ring has he given me."

"No, not a ring, but little pieces of paper, little pieces of paper which you have not been able to exchange for money. Wouldn't you like Lao Yang's assistance to cash them?"

Kuei-lien's face grew red with a blush the girl could not check, but she held her body from a second telltale jerk.

"I don't understand what you mean," she said.

"Come now," protested the t'ai-t'ai, "you can't deny that you received checks for these amounts." She reeled off from memory the sums and dates of the checks she was certain Kuei-lien had received.

"What should I do with checks?" asked the girl.

"That's just the point," the t'ai-t'ai smiled in return; "what should you do with them? They are useless in their present form and you will never be permitted to change them."

"I don't know anything about these things," Kuei-lien persisted stubbornly.

"Just think a little," her mistress went on in the same bland voice, "and don't try to keep up appearances before me. Who brought you up, may I ask? Who saved you from being a slattern in the scullery at this very moment? It's worth remembering, because the same person who lifted you to your present favor can throw you down again." The t'ai-t'ai allowed a minute for these words to have their effect while she looked round the room. "You are very comfortable here," she remarked, "you have prospered well for the short time you have been here—well-filled boxes, plenty of clothes; I have indeed been generous to you. It would be a pity to lose them all."

"They are yours," admitted Kuei-lien. "I have no claim to them. Take them."

"Ah, don't try that game of candor with me," said the woman. "I am not threatening, mind you. I am simply appealing to your reasonableness. I should be sorely disappointed if the protégée over whom I have taken such pains proved to be merely a clever fool. Just let me imagine two pictures for you. On the one hand you cling obstinately to little bits of paper for which you never can get a copper cent. What do I do? I call in two strong men who are waiting outside; they tie a piece of cloth across your mouth so as not to disturb the household unnecessarily, then they twist your arms so—and so; do you think you wouldn't soon be anxious to point out these worthless checks? Or they ransack these boxes, take off these pretty clothes, and cut the linings away with scissors; don't you think we could find them even if you had to stand stark naked watching us? What good would you get of your stubbornness? Just the pleasure of being sold back to be a slave again. That's one picture," concluded the t'ai-t'ai, as though she had been telling a story.

Kuei-lien listened in startled attention, quite hypnotized by the woman's smooth voice.

"Now for the other side, a much more cheerful picture. We'll imagine you giving me these checks. Lao Yang, at my orders, will cash them. Of that money I will give you one fourth. You may think that is too little, but it is more than you could get in any other way; it is much more than nothing. The best part of it is, you have the chance of earning more money on the same terms. It is not wrong. The Great Man is not well, as you know, and he is stubborn about keeping his money in a foreign bank. He thinks he can provide for us in time, but I know his disease: pfui! in a moment he's gone—like a candle blown out. If he dies, what becomes of us? Is it our fault for snatching what safeguards we can? Well, that's the other picture. You may not be contented with a fourth, but you'll like it better than being sold to a brothel. I am not easy with those who betray me."

Kuei-lien showed her mettle by smiling.

"Yes, I do like the second picture better," she said, "it is drawn very well. Do you offer me this picture?"

"I offer it—and I shall add a few more colors on the day Nancy marries my nephew. You have had your own game there, I know," she remarked cheerfully, "but your game is a risky one. I don't blame you for trying your own plans, but you were trying for all or nothing. While I'm here, it would have been nothing."

"I understand," said Kuei-lien. "I accept your offer."

"I am glad my judgment has been vindicated. I had begun to fear you were just like the common trash who remain slaves all their lives. They think they are clever because the cat doesn't stop them when they go to snatch rice from the trap. You are sensible; you understand that there is profit in being grateful."

Kuei-lien answered the t'ai-t'ai by unbuttoning her jacket and loosening her clothes till she could reach the narrow girdle bound next to her skin. Pulling it out, she cut the threads and extracted five folded slips of paper.

"That is the proper number," said the t'ai-t'ai. "I will bring you a fourth of this sum to-morrow. Remember, you have a free hand. I will see that no one interferes with you. Don't be too hasty, don't drive the Great Man to excess; then there should be many more of these."

Calmly she bowed herself out.

CHAPTER XVII

By one shrewd stroke the t'ai-t'ai had regained Kuei-lien's faltering allegiance. She was very happy over the effects of her skill and particularly pleased at her discernment in the choice of an agent. The concubine had won more than she had lost in the admiration of her mistress. Any ordinary girl, caught thieving, as the t'ai-t'ai termed Kuei-lien's machinations, would have held stubbornly to her story and forced a final violent exposure. It took genius to give way before the inevitable. Kuei-lien had that uncommon genius. So the new alliance thrived on a mutual respect and understanding.

Kuei-lien saw that for the present at least her fortune consisted in loyalty to her mistress. She paid her dividends, as it were, by skillfully teasing Herrick into health and out of it, never letting him lose the need of her or grow sated, and inveigling him more and more easily into the gifts of money which the man granted now almost from force of habit. After the first marked change from the robustness of his former days, there were few further signs of decline. The man was sinking, but sinking imperceptibly. He ceased to see much of his children: he would see them to-morrow,—so he told himself day after day,—but each new morning there was the plea of illness.

The truth was that Herrick was afraid of death, afraid to provoke those terrible spasms of pain which he laid wrong-headedly enough to worry over Nancy's affairs; he was satisfied to stop thinking and surrender to the lulling security of the senses, to a desire for Kuei-lien's presence, which overpowered every thought of duty, every wish. So week by week his strength and his money drifted away; week by week the t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien buried their three fourths and one fourth of his treasure.

They could not wholly conceal their secret. There were others too intimately involved in the state of Herrick's health not to watch jealously the spoils that Hai t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien were taking. Nancy and Edward went their way in ignorance, but to the three other concubines it was a matter of life and death. If Herrick died, they would be the property of the t'ai-t'ai without a cent or a right of their own. Time was slipping past. Herrick seemed to have forgotten they existed; he never called for them. Even when the third and fourth concubines bore sons in quick succession, Herrick did not come. The t'ai-t'ai heaped presents upon this auspicious progeny, gave great feasts for each of the babies at the end of their first month, but the father did not appear. He was too ill. The second wife read the message of this dissimulated kindness and knew correctly that the more the mistress of the household showered them with gifts, the greater wrong she was doing them behind their backs.

At last she saw no recourse except to appeal to Nancy. The English children were the only ones who could demand access to Herrick. With great caution the second wife discarded her old policy of holding aloof from these Westerners, knowing that the t'ai-t'ai might be alive to the first hints of an uncommon friendship. She bided her time till she caught her enemies at a discreet distance, then she came out frankly, volubly, with the whole story of what Nancy's stepmother and fifth wife were managing.

"They are killing your father and robbing him, and they are going to sell you to the t'ai-t'ai's nephew."

"But the t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien are not friends," exclaimed Nancy, taken aback by these sudden confidences. "Kuei-lien tried to prevent my engagement—"

"Till she got her price. Now they are fond as thieves. Everybody knows it. None of us is blind except your father. They keep him sick so that they can wheedle money out of him. They will screw thousands of taels out of him for your wedding—that will go to the t'ai-t'ai's family, and you'll be married in a year."

"That can't be. It's arranged that I shall not be married for four years."

"Four years, bah! Don't you think they can persuade a dying man into hastening such a happy event?"

"Surely he is not dying!" she exclaimed in great agitation.

"He is dying," affirmed the woman; "his brain is nearly dead now; his body will soon follow."

Nancy stared with immensely opened eyes as though she saw the whole terrible scene before her. She had forgotten to sit down. Her hands took a firmer grip on the chair behind which she stood.

"What shall we do?" she asked in a strangely quiet voice.

"We!" exclaimed the visitor. "We can do nothing. If the t'ai-t'ai so much as heard that I had been to see you, off she would pack me to-morrow. You have four friends, every one of us helpless. You have two bitter enemies. It is just as much your battle as ours. You can see your father; we cannot. If anyone is to do anything, it must be you."

"Yes, you are right," said Nancy, remembering her encounter with Kuei-lien in the Western Hills. "I will do something. And no one shall know you asked me."

This interview gave an ultimate touch to the change which the experiences of the last few months had wrought in Nancy. She examined her chances of grief open-eyed, prepared to meet them with the simplicity of courage which came natural to her steady heart.

The first step was to supplant Kuei-lien and the t'ai-t'ai in their dominance over her father. She moved so swiftly that the two conspirators were astonished to find the girl installed in her father's room. Herrick, with pathetic docility, childlike in its readiness to be pleased by trifles, surrendered himself wholly to the mastery of a strong will.

Kuei-lien protested that Nancy would do injury to her father's delicate health by so uncalled-for an intrusion.

"My father is ill," replied the daughter. "It would be wrong for me to waste my time playing when he needs my help. It is time I took some share in my duties instead of leaving all the hardship to you."

"But you have had no experience; you don't know how to take care of him."

"I can learn. He will be glad of a change and so will you."

Kuei-lien knew Nancy's obstinacy too well to waste more time in futile dispute. She hastened to tell the t'ai-t'ai the alarming turn Nancy's action had caused.

"We can't separate them," she exclaimed. "The miserable girl has had her bedding moved into a room next to the Great Man's and says she will live there till he is well. What can we do?"

"We've got to get her married," said the t'ai-t'ai; "there will be no peace till she's gone. Suppose he dies because of her folly; we shall be left like beggars."

"But we can't get her married. She won't obey us. She will obey her father, but she won't listen to us."

"It's my own stupidity," moaned the t'ai-t'ai. "I should never have allowed that old hag of a nurse to remain; I should have taught these two young demons to obey me when they were young. She put these conceited notions into their heads, taught them to lord it over us as though we were dust for their feet to trample. You must persuade the Great Man to hasten the wedding of his daughter; you must find some way. Ah, if I can only get her locked into her red chair and safe in my brother's house, I'll show them how to handle the vixen. She'll be a tamed daughter-in-law if they follow my advice! A stick—that's what the hussy needs, till she's glad to beat clothes at the pond and clean my brother's pipes."

"Very entertaining thoughts," Kuei-lien scoffed, "but not very helpful just now."

They were, in truth, far from helpful. Nancy had learned her lesson and quarantined her father from his too solicitous concubine with the coolness and resource of which she could thank Kuei-lien for teaching her the trick. She would not be enticed from her father's door, and day after day her excuse for this usurpation became greater because it was undeniable that she was nursing the exhausted man slowly back to strength.

At last the t'ai-t'ai had to intervene, an act she was most reluctant to do, preferring always, as a politic woman, to remain in the background. Nancy did not dare to stop her from an interview with her father and retired when she saw that the wife wished to be alone with her husband. For a long time the door remained shut. She could hear the t'ai-t'ai talking indistinguishable sentences in a low rapid voice. Occasionally a laugh was audible. As no immediate conclusion to this talk seemed likely, Nancy took the chance to fetch some clothes from her room. She was not gone many minutes. To her relief she found the door still shut, and the conversation still continuing. But after an hour the girl became restless. No answer was paid to her knock. She tried the door; it was bolted. Not till she had beaten upon the wooden panels for several minutes did anyone deign to take notice. The door was pulled ajar; the girl saw to her amazement the face of Kuei-lien.

"Your father is feeling better now," said the concubine, "and has sent for me to take your place. He wants you to rest."

"But I don't wish to rest," protested Nancy, "and, if my father gives orders, I take them from him, not from you."

Before Kuei-lien could stop her, she had pushed her way into the room. In the few minutes she had been gone, not only the concubine had been smuggled into the place, but the glasses, bottles, pipe, all the vicious instruments she had been so wakeful to keep out of her father's grasp. For the first time in her life she forgot her father's presence in her rage at the duplicity practised by the concubine.

"This is the way you look after a sick man, is it?" she cried. "Take these things away."

Kuei-lien did not move.

"Have you lost all respect for your father?" she asked in the correct tones of a schoolmistress chiding a naughty pupil. Then she turned to Herrick on his couch. "Now you see what she's like," she said, as if to justify some previous remarks. "Do you wonder that none of us can do anything with her when she tries to rule even her father with these haughty ways?"

"I am trying to make my father well. She is trying to make him ill," groaned Nancy, addressing her father in desperation. Kuei-lien snorted in bitter amusement.

"What profit would there be for me in making him ill? Doesn't my life depend upon his? Do I wish to be turned away like a penniless beggar?"

"This has gone far enough," protested Herrick, rousing himself to the distasteful duty of interference. "You are both wrong to quarrel in this shameless way."

Nancy's self-possession had been too sorely tested in recent days. She could not hold back tears of vexation at hearing her words dismissed as a vulgar quarrel.

"Oh my father, they are killing you, killing you, and robbing you!" she cried.

Kuei-lien scoffed.

"A nice imagination your daughter has," she said. "She has borrowed too many novels from her old amah."

"Isn't it the truth?" demanded Nancy.

"Oh yes, of course it's the truth if you insist upon it. Your father is so helpless, isn't he, that he must need his seventeen-year-old daughter for a nurse to protect him!"

Herrick had grown more and more uncomfortable; this bickering was compromising his dignity, making him a laughingstock.

"Now, now, Nancy," he said soothingly, "you are saying quite unjustifiable things. Your feelings are carrying away your sense of reason. Kuei-lien is right. I am not a child."

"Make her take those things away," Nancy persisted, determined upon one last stubborn appeal. "She is only trying to harm you. I am—"

"Be still," her father interrupted curtly. "I have had enough of this, do you understand? You have done your duty, you have taken care of me when I was ill. But it is no part of your duty to advise your father. Who has been teaching you such presumptuous manners? If I need you again, I shall call for you; until I do so, I don't want you coming here making these disgraceful scenes. I won't hear of such ungovernable interference with my own will—and that from a chit of a girl."

"Her boldness is becoming intolerable," commented Kuei-lien, as Nancy silently withdrew. This was one word too many for Herrick's ruffled temper.

"I wish you were as honest as she is," he said.

Nancy had won this much of a victory in blighting Kuei-lien's charms for the moment. Deep irritation settled on Herrick at the thought of this wordy brawl between concubine and daughter, a brawl they had waged as though his presence, his judgment, did not matter. They had treated him like a weakling. The irritation stung and rankled because the man knew too well his own cowardice was at the bottom of it, his cowardice and his vanity, which had kept him from supporting Nancy in her appeal to his best instincts. Nancy had said wild things, of course, but there was no doubt she believed all that she had said and it was more than possible that these wild guesses passed for truth in the women's quarters; Herrick had gained insight enough, after his years of multiple weddedness, to know some of the jealous currents that animated the course of life in his household. He did not appreciate a tenth of the actual facts, but he was beginning to see that his wives were not of one mind and that they were subject to natural fears as to what might become of them and their children if he died.

"I'll settle it once and for all," he decided, astonishing the household by calling for his chair. In Peking sedan chairs were becoming out-dated relics of the past; motor cars rushed everywhere and the wide, dusty streets were full of elegant rickshas, commodious enough for the fat officials who sat in stupid composure while their outrunners pushed and shouted a rapid way for them through the traffic. But Herrick would have none of these. He preferred the dignity of his heavy blue chair, which four bearers carried in state while his Chinese secretary, bringing cards, scuffled hastily in his wake.

The chair coolies finally halted before the gate of an ugly building, a grim and cheerless structure imitated in gray brick from the most disheartening of Western models. Herrick loathed the penal appearance of the place. After some hesitation he sent in cards for Mr. Ronald Nasmith.

CHAPTER XVIII

For a second time, after all his years in Peking, Herrick was denying the sureness of the root which his life had taken in alien soil, by turning to a casually met stranger from the West for help he looked in vain to obtain from his adopted countrymen.

"This is a hideous place," he remarked, scanning the dirty whitewashed walls of the guestroom into which Nasmith had ushered him. "You don't live here, I hope."

"No, thank God."

"This is the blight our Western ways put upon China. How can you instruct students in a hole like this? These places make me more anti foreign than the Chinese themselves. I should like to sweep all of you into the sea; I can see too well the beauty you are desecrating."

Nasmith thought to himself that the reverse might also be true. He had spent an unquiet winter. He had never ceased debating the choice Herrick had given him, as though the offer still lay open for his decision. It was futile, useless debate, a purely academic distraction from which no profit could be gained, yet it continued to wound him. Nancy had cast a spell of vivid charm over all his family; she had won their hearts by an interest which long outlasted the summer, a charm which hung over them like a receding shadow so that they lived almost with bated breath beneath the fascination of her mystery, wondering where she was, what she was doing and—this they felt but feared to mention aloud—what perils she might be facing with the steadfast dark eyes they remembered so tenderly.

Nasmith's particular recollections were still more poignant because Herrick's unconventional offer, the curious phrasing of his scrolls, upon which the offer had shed some light, made him feel that Nancy's life was bound to his by a fateful sympathy which would persist even though it were balked of all real fulfillment. Yet even now, attracted to a Nancy who was almost a legend, he could not make up his mind to accept, if her father renewed the proposal.

He might have spared himself these worries. The older man set that issue at rest by his next words.

"I have come on a matter of business," he said.

"Business?"

"Yes, I want your help in something I have postponed for years, something I hoped I might never have to do: it smacks too much of your dreary Western formality. But I know, now, my mind will be easier when it's done. I want to make my will."

"Aren't there any provisions for a will in the Chinese customs you like so well?" asked Nasmith, smiling ironically as he spoke. "Surely the Chinese, after four thousand years, have devised some way of leaving their treasure behind them. Or have they excelled us again and learned how to lay up their gold and silver in Heaven?"

"Oh, they have their ways," admitted Herrick, ignoring Nasmith's sneer; "the family inherits the money and attends to its just distribution. That is of no use to me, however, for I have no family."

"Haven't you? I thought you were a shining example of the family man."

"Ah, yes; but all women. They would tear each other in pieces if I put any money in their hands. It's only men who can manage these matters."

"Yes, it is a misfortune that you should not have been born Chinese. That would have solved many difficulties. But what advice am I worthy to give you? If you, with all your years in China, can't leave your money satisfactorily, how can my limited experience be of use?"

"I am not seeking advice; I want you to be my—what do you call it? —executor, and keep my will, and see that my property is fairly distributed. I seem bound to ask favors of you. This is no easy one, I know, but perhaps it is easier than the last. If I live long enough, it may cost you no trouble at all."

"If you don't?"

"Then I admit frankly you will have the devil of a time. You'll have to apportion certain sums, which I shall specify, among several women, each of whom will think you are robbing her. But, once you've done it, you're rid of them. They can gamble away their share in a night if they wish without your being under any obligation to interfere. I don't expect you to take this trouble without being paid for it; I insist upon that, though I know that will not be a consideration to you if you really wish to help me; but I wouldn't ask my own brother to make so large a gift of his time and patience without some reward, so please don't protest. Your most exacting burden will be keeping an eye upon my boy, Edward. If he's twenty-one before I die, well and good: you'll have no responsibility. If he's younger, he'll need some direction."

"What about Nancy?"

"Ah, Nancy—she is arranged for; I won't bother you with that responsibility again. She is to get her share when she's married."

"Married!"

"Yes, I've found a good husband for her. How could I rest easy with that responsibility on my mind? Let's hope, my dear sir, that when you're married you will have only sons. You'll have more sleep, less worry. It is too great a strain to have the future of growing daughters on one's mind."

"But when is she to be married?" asked Nasmith, trying to keep his voice level.

"That I can't say. Not for four years, I hope. You remember the terms you found too extravagant. If I find my strength failing, I shall hasten it. If anything should happen too suddenly, that is, if she should fail to be married before I die, then I shall have to ask you to hand over her marriage portion. But I shall leave no stone unturned to spare you such a disagreeable necessity."

"Then she is to marry a Chinese?" asked Nasmith, scarcely brave enough to hear the answer.

"She is engaged to a Chinese."

Nasmith did not pursue this topic further. There were too many thoughts to be uttered; he did not know which to select. The shame, the wrongfulness of the father's action choked him, but he remembered that he had been warned. He had refused his chance and felt honor-bound not to protest, now that Herrick had disposed of his daughter in a way which seemed to him so utterly appalling. He knew, also, how unavailing protests would be, how deaf the ears upon which they would fall. A betrothal in China was too binding, too sacred a compact to be dissolved by the persuasion of a moment. So he kept silent, preferring not to waste words.

Disappointment over Herrick's relentless execution of a threat he himself never had taken seriously made him all the more willing to accept this second trust the man had sought from him. He would be able to follow events in this weird family, still more to assume some responsibility for them; perhaps Nancy's tragic case was not hopeless—some stubborn cell of his brain would not be reconciled to accepting it as hopeless—he might yet, he must, have his part to play, his chance to intervene. In one breath he prayed that Herrick might live to be ninety and that Nancy's affianced bridegroom be struck down by all the plagues of the East.

"This time," he told Herrick, "I can help you. I shall be glad to act as your executor, but I hope the necessity of doing so may never arise—at least not for many years."

"Thank you," said Herrick gravely, "you have taken a great load off my mind. Now we must have witnesses, and the will, of course, must be left with you. It would never do to put it where others can tamper with it."

"I can get witnesses: Mr. Beresford should do, and my brother-in-law—he is a banker. I am sure he will be useful."

"Good. Can you bring them to my house? Here is my card. I will write the address in English, if you wish. Could you come, say, at five to-morrow?"

"I am sure we could."

Herrick departed, greatly pleased at the granting of his request and not without regretful thoughts over having lost what seemed a predestined husband for Nancy. What, after all, was the training he had boasted of giving his daughter? Months had gone. Except during his spell of illness, he had scarcely seen the girl. He began to feel that he had sacrificed her for an inconsiderable point. The thought was too painful. It was better to be philosophic, to say that what was to be would be despite all the evasive twistings of little human schemes. With this comfortable casting of his burden upon fate Herrick went to sleep and did not waken till he felt his chair settle on the pavement of his own courtyard.

Promptly at five the next day Nasmith with his two witnesses drove up the narrow hutung to Herrick's star-studded gate. His news had caused a great outcry at home. He had kept in confidence the story of Herrick's offer of betrothal and how the father had threatened to marry his daughter to a Chinese. No hint had been suggested to break the shock of this grievous information. So stunned were his sister and nieces by an arrangement which seemed both wanton and abominable that Nasmith, to his own bitter amusement, found himself defending the father, trying to convince his outraged relations that there was nothing unnatural in betrothing to a Chinese a girl who had been trained, all her life, to Chinese manners, Chinese ways of life. He was a lame advocate and could only listen, with a disheartened smile, to the dozen wild plots for saving Nancy which were bandied round the table.

"If she ever has a mind to it, she will save herself," was the best comfort he could offer.

"Do you know the way Chinese women save themselves?" asked his brother-in-law grimly. "At the bottom of a well."

Nasmith cheerfully would have strangled Mr. Ferris for this ill-chosen remark.

At five the next day Herrick received his three guests. They went curiously through the draughty hallways, the wintry courtyards, to the room their host had prepared for them.

"Here is the document," he said, offering them a piece of carefully inscribed foolscap. "Will you read it? I think it is properly phrased. I spent twenty years in the Customs, you know, and did my turn at writing dispatches."

The three men scanned the paper and could pick no flaw in its wording. Nasmith did begin to protest that he wanted no executor's fee, but Herrick overruled him. After repeated scrutiny Ferris and Beresford signed their names as witnesses. Even Beresford's lips failed of their customary joke at the solemn moment when Herrick handed to his executor the will, which seemed the last seal on a life that had failed. Nasmith took it with trembling hands.

"Now, my friends, to be more cheerful," said Herrick, "we must celebrate the occasion with a feast."

The banquet, it seemed, was ready. In a neighboring room the surprised men found the table spread with a cotton cloth and crowded with the tidbits which precede the meal: oranges, quarters of pomegranate, sections of pomelo, ducks' eggs, black from their pickling in lime, the thinnest slices of ham and sausage, dried melon seeds, candied peanuts—a dozen dishes grouped in a pattern.

Despite the festive appearance of the board, the grotesque decorations,—gay phœnixes ingeniously put together from scented orchids, silk, and brass wire,—Herrick surveyed the sight glumly.

"Four is poor company for a feast," he said, "but the ladies will help to cheer us up."

"The ladies?" Nasmith wondered, with great hope in his breast, and kept an ever expectant eye upon the door, through which he longed every moment to see Nancy enter. But the "ladies" were not of the household. Never would Herrick have violated Chinese custom so grossly as to bring women of his own family to eat with strangers. They were sing-song girls, merry entertainers introduced after the great dish, the sharks' fins, had been steamingly served. Slim, lithe children in gaudy satin jackets, scant trousers, they came in laughing, and sat in pretended embarrassment on stools behind the four men. Thimble-cups of heady kao-liang soon put them at ease amid these Western barbarians, roused their throats to shrill rhythmical songs which Nasmith, in his disappointment, was slow to appreciate, though the succession of explosive vowels and sharply punctuated trills often gave scope for tones of great tenderness. Herrick was instantly at home with these girls, patted them on the knees, teased them by bouts of drinking games into consuming more wine. Beresford followed his example and waxed merry with the slender damsel assigned for his delight, but Ferris, conscious of a wife at home and of her brother present, was more discreet, while Nasmith sat in morose silence, angry at these trivial philanderings when his heart was aching for Nancy.

Yet even his anger melted as he began very slowly to recognize that Herrick's gayety was feigned, that the man was bidding an empty defiance to the shadow of death, the shadow of defeat, which hung over him. From the moment Nasmith realized this the scene became almost too ghastly to be endured. The sight of this aging man, with no recourse but a painted courtesan to keep up his spirits, became the most pathetic display he had ever watched. He felt he was helpless in the presence of sorcery, helpless to raise his fist and shatter the web of illusion.

Dish followed dish, all the variegated delicacies of a Chinese meal, giblets fried and peppered, whole ducks torn apart from their tongues to their feet, fish spicily sandwiched in cabbage, steamed bread flavored with garlic and pork, glutinous sweet rice into which lotus seeds and candied fruit had been mixed—course after course, till they had long become uncounted, before wine was poured under a copper vessel and the flames allowed to lick its sides with tongues of livid blue and green light and the boiling water crowded with slices of raw fish and pheasant and chicken, green vegetables and crusts of burnt rice, the last splendid dish of the feast. Herrick pushed these ingredients into the cauldron with his chopsticks and then heaped up the bowls of rice which had been served to his guests, bidding them eat when they had no longer appetite to eat.

Then he rose unsteadily. He had consumed tens of the tiny cupfuls of wine; his face was flushed. But it was more than the wine which seemed to overcome him at this portentous moment. A look in his eyes bade even the laughing sing-song girls be quiet. With the glare of the electric lights beating upon his forehead he looked like a man lost, utterly spent by the violence of a tropical sun. He lifted a glass with one shaking hand, leaned against the table with the other. His guests wondered dumbly what amazing action was to follow.

"Gentlemen," he said, "my heart is at rest."

"What a lie!" thought Nasmith.

"For a long time I have made myself miserable with half measures. That is finished, I tell you—finished, finished. To-night for the last time you have heard me speak my native tongue. I will never speak it again. I want you to drink to Timothy Herrick. He is dead, thank God! He has no successors. All that remains of him is that piece of paper you have folded into your pocket."

Higher went his glass. "To Timothy Herrick!" he cried.

"Surely he is mad," said the eyes of the men who were watching him.

"To Timothy Herrick. He was an unhappy man. The sooner he is forgotten, the better. God rest his spirit!"

He drained the glass and then with an emphatic gesture hurled it to the floor. Instantly the four sing-song girls followed his lead. Highly amused by this noisy whimsical end to the banquet, they "dried" their cups—as the expression went—and hurled them down with a crash, so that the splinters skipped like diamonds across the stone floor. Beresford, too, carried away by the tense feeling of the moment, drank the ominous toast and shivered his glass into fragments, making a crash which stirred the girls into much laughter, much cheering and clapping of hands. Only Ferris and Nasmith took no part in the riotous demonstration: the one pulled his moustache in embarrassment over such an unmanly display of emotion, the other looked at Herrick as though he had beheld his words literally fulfilled, as though he were gazing upon a corpse.

Not because of Herrick alone did his heart seem suffocated with pain. He was like a man staring into a crystal. Behind the vow of lips that never again should speak English he suffered a vision of Nancy shut off from sight and sound, shut off from the timeless beauty of love. In the shattered fragments of glass, sparkling even in the brilliance of this garish room, he saw all that she had been born to enjoy flung away, wantonly destroyed.

CHAPTER XIX

In a household where every trivial accident was snatched at by the jaded inmates as meat for hours of excited gossip, an event so unparalleled as the visit of three foreigners was bound to stir Herrick's cloistered family to throbbing ecstasies of curiosity.

Herrick in his own time gave away the secret. He called the t'ai-t'ai and told her the terms of his will. There was a glint of malice in his eyes when he saw that her imperturbable countenance, well controlled though it usually was, could not hide consternation at this unwelcome news. He took pleasure in extolling the fairness of his scheme, in hauling out one by one, like a magician extracting rabbits from a hat, the advantages of a plan in which he knew too well and too keenly the dazed woman could see no shadow of advantage.

When she had been given the precedence of her station, a full twenty-four hours to meditate upon the abominable Western rectitude of this will, the British justice which was the last outlandish gesture of the Timothy Herrick who had ceased to be, he called up the other wives in turn and told them what their share was to be and, in great detail, how they were to get it.

None, of course, was satisfied, none but was sure this unknown executor would rifle the estate with amiable peculations of his own,—why shouldn't he? —yet the three subordinate wives who filled the gap between the t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien had less cause to grumble, because they knew their shares were safer in the hands of a stranger than left to the charity of the t'ai-t'ai. This worthy woman gaped for words to vent her disgruntled spleen.

"The older he grows, the madder he gets," she told Kuei-lien. "Who would have thought, after all these years, after the careful management I have exercised in his house, that he would turn from me, his wife, and put this extravagant trust in a stranger? It's these beastly children he's concerned for; they disturb his mind and put these queer notions into his head."

"Oh, we're no worse off than we were before," said Kuei-lien. "I can still get money from him in the old way—"

"If his daughter doesn't interfere."

"We must see that she doesn't interfere."

The t'ai-t'ai accepted this advice with a snort. But there was food for thought in the words. She must take pains to see that Nancy did not enjoy the liberty she had enjoyed all too freely in the past.

"You do your part and I'll do mine," she said finally.

Kuei-lien was called upon soon for hers. Herrick, sitting dejectedly in his room, felt himself at the loose ends of patience with life. The future was settled. He could enjoy his desires without constraint. He sent for his concubine. He was fingering his check book when she entered.

"You have been very clever," he said, "far more clever than these other women of my household, I see. My affection, I notice, has paid you well in the last few months."

Kuei-lien smiled, not troubling to deny the greed he had uncovered.

"Cleverness is always costly," she remarked.

"Yes, you are right, it should be."

The man wrote a check larger than any of his previous rewards; he read the sum before her eyes.

"It is unsigned, you observe," he explained. "Now show me if you are clever enough to win my signature to this piece of paper."

This was temptation the concubine relished. She led the man through every extreme of her sensual imagination, but even when beguiled into amorous confusion by her beauty she found him obstinate in paying the price of her victory, as though he had locked the gate to his treasure, locked the gate and discarded the key. Kuei-lien fell back upon the last resource of her trade. She provoked him to cruelty. She stood the sting of the lash across her naked shoulders, smiling grimly, biting her lips to keep from crying out in pain, quivering but not shrinking from each fresh agony of his fury, till the time came when he fell, sobbing like a baby, on his couch, exhausted in spirit, ashamed of the mordant brutality which would have been accounted vile from a beast. It was easy, in his repentant mood, to secure the signature of the check.

While the ordeal was livid in her memory, the girl bargained her stripes against the cupidity of the t'ai-t'ai, refusing downright to face more of this abuse till she had got her share of the gains greatly increased.

The t'ai-t'ai needed to keep her husband occupied, since she was trying, for the first time in years, to win some control over Nancy. In the interests of her own family, the family to which the girl was betrothed, she had specious excuses of duty for overseeing the occupations of the girl. She dismissed Nancy's teacher; what time was there, she asked, for further frivolities of study in a girl who had learned already too much for her own and her husband's good? To her surprise, Nancy submitted without complaint, submitted so gracefully that the t'ai-t'ai suspected some darkly cherished plot and went further in her exactions, shortening the hours of Nancy's play in the garden, setting her heavy tasks of sewing upon her bridal garments.

Nancy was unbelievably docile. She was not reconciled to the t'ai-t'ai's show of authority, which came with a bad grace after the many years she had been left to go her own willful path. But the t'ai-t'ai for the moment was too powerful and she was doing, after all, only what Nancy recognized she had a right to do, making the girl a meet and seemly wife for her nephew. The marriage lurked inescapably in front of her; Nancy had neither thought nor plan of evading her engagement. It was no use making enemies of the family to which she must go, the family to which the t'ai-t'ai, though she had left it, still seemed more closely related than to Herrick's improvised house. Meekly Nancy bent her face over the scarlet satin of her bridal gown and meditated all the gloomy, curious, fearful, teasing thoughts which the mere color of the garments stirred in her virgin mind.

Her old nurse was not so complaisant. Her grumbles lost their discreetness; their echoes were heard throughout the house. Kuei-lien warned her mistress.

"That's the old jade from whom Nancy gets her mischievous ideas," she remarked. "She did her best to break up the engagement to your nephew."

"You mean you and she did your best, don't you?" sniffed the woman. "Still, you are right; the children have grown up. Why should they need a nurse?"

This was not a new thought. But now the desperation of the t'ai-t'ai heaped fuel upon her courage. With Herrick growing day by day more helpless in the arms of his concubine, more childish, more easily and pitifully led like a bear with a ring through his snout, the woman believed the time at last had come for settling old scores and writing off her balance of revenge.

The chance came when the cold winds blew for weeks and filtering dust of spring, sweeping in clouds from the plains of Kansu and the crumbling deserts of Gobi, choked the house, suffocated ears and eyes and nostrils and throats with fine sand, and reduced everyone's temper to that inflammable point where quarrels leap up from a spark. Nancy did fumbling work on her bridal skirt. The t'ai-t'ai rebuked her with harsh words. The child threw aside deference to her stepmother and responded as angrily. But her flare of indignation paled before the great blaze of wrath which suddenly burst from the lips of the amah, who had interposed in the dispute and been unable to quench her long-stifled embers of hatred.

For all the pent-up enmity of the past she now found words and, with no care who should hear her, she denounced Nancy's tyrant with long sentences of withering invective. The whole household rushed to hear; the other wives stood round with gaping mouths, secretly gloating over the t'ai-t'ai's discomfiture. Even Herrick could not remain deaf to such noise and was forced irritably to inquire the reason for this disturbance. In her frenzy the nurse was like a poetess, singing out her unforgivable abuse in a rhythmical chant which her victim was powerless to quell. Every line was jerked short with a taunt, as though the infuriated woman defied the world to contradict her words. The taunts stung like little leaden pellets on the end of a whiplash. Nancy, standing cold and white in dismay, expected to see these venomous syllables cut marks of blood across the face of her stepmother.

A scene like this could not be excused. The result was what the old nurse had foreseen and tried with such patience to guard against during every provocation of the last few months: she was called before Herrick, his wife standing vindictively at his side, and told the cruel, farcical pretexts proper to the decencies of the occasion. The children had outgrown a nurse. She deserved a rest after these many years of faithful service, service Herrick was glad to reward with a gift which would keep her in comfort to the end of her years. The man knew in his heart he was pronouncing a dastardly sentence. His voice faltered when he referred to the better reward the old woman would find in the hearts of his children. But it was a just sentence. He would not be moved when the amah threw herself at his feet and begged with tears to remain. The demonstrative scene vexed him. He hated scenes. The more the stricken woman pleaded, the more stubbornly his will hardened. He turned away and left her weeping uselessly.

Yet, terrible as her grief had been, not till Nancy and Edward learned her punishment did it reach its climax. The two children heard the news as though the world had crumbled round them. They were losing the only mother they knew, for there had been not a day of their lives but began and ended with the cheerful gossip of their nurse. Edward was dazed by a whimpering unbelief, while Nancy went to intercede with her father. But he was tired of the subject, conscious that he had been less than fair, so he curtly told her to mind her own affairs and for the last time to stop interfering with the counsels of her elders.

In her despair the wretched girl sought the t'ai-t'ai, from whom she could not remember having ever asked sympathy or help. She was too proud to beg or to weep; this was not her way.

"It was my fault, not amah's," she said. "Won't you punish me? I provoked the trouble. I was undutiful, hot-headed. I deserve to be punished, not an old woman who has been a servant so long that she has forgotten her place. She will never do this again, I can promise you."

"I am not punishing anyone," said the t'ai-t'ai with her blandest accents. "The quarrel—pooh, I've forgotten that. We all lose our tempers at times. I'm not punishing your amah. Why should I wish to punish an old and loyal servant? This is your father's decision, a decision he made long ago. How can you call it a punishment to reward a faithful servant by letting her spend the rest of her life in peace and quiet? Is there any one of us who wouldn't rejoice at such punishment?"

"But if she doesn't want peace and quiet, why force these blessings upon her?"

"She may not desire peace and quiet; we do," replied the t'ai-t'ai unwarily.

"Then it is a punishment."

The woman was vexed by Nancy's persistence.

"You are too young to concern yourself with things you don't understand."

"But I do understand this," Nancy insisted; "you are punishing her because she does not wish to go. You are punishing her for my fault. I want to be punished."

"You want to be punished, do you? And what do you consider a suitable punishment? Would you go and tell your father you wish to be married this year, not to wait three more years? Would you do this so that your stupid old amah can wear out her bones working when she might be at home, growing fat in ease and idleness?"

The t'ai-t'ai phrased her proposal in terms of contemptuous absurdity, as though to say she had no hope of its being accepted. She watched the girl narrowly, enjoying the look of dismay which crossed her face and more than a little surprised that Nancy should take the offer seriously.

"Is this a punishment?" she asked.

"You mean do I consider marriage to my nephew a punishment?" said the stepmother, for once talking openly to Nancy as she never would have talked to one of her own race. "Would I have made the match if I thought of it so? I am not used to these newfangled manners. When I was married, my mother didn't speak of it to me or ask me what I wished. Her wisdom was enough. But your father has new ideas, perhaps they are foreign ideas, and so we promised you should have these four years at home because he thought you wanted them. So there we are, bound by a promise. And my mother is growing old and feeble; she wants to see her grandson married; she keeps reproaching my brother for his promise, saying she cannot live another three years, she cannot wait so long. What am I to do? If you told your father you were ready to be married, he might release us from this promise. Then there would be happiness for all of us."

The t'ai-t'ai grew embarrassed by the unexpected lengths of her recital and was not her usual cool self. The unlooked-for event of Nancy's even seeming to hesitate over this proposal had shaken the woman out of her suavity. Nancy too might have been confused by hearing her marriage and even her future husband so freely mentioned by that most correct of all persons, the t'ai-t'ai, but this breach of impropriety dwindled to inconsequence beside the choice she felt bound to make.

"If I tell my father this, will the amah remain?"

"I will see that she does remain. I promise you that, although it will not be easy, now that your father has decided she shall go."

"And suppose I tell my father this, what does it mean? Does it mean that I must be married this year, that I cannot wait three more, even two more, years?"

"I can't answer for what it may mean to your father. You know his mind as well as I do. It may mean nothing to him. He makes his own laws. He may choose to wait, he may choose to hasten your wedding, he may choose anything. How can I see into his brain?"

The t'ai-t'ai showed by a gesture that she had long ago given up fathoming the vagaries of her husband's will.

Nancy pondered the matter. More than deep affection for the amah stirred her heart. She was seized by an unconscionable longing for sacrifice, a desire to do something heroic, to end the tedious apathy of waiting and fearing which had sapped her spirit in recent months. The suspense and the slowly encroaching tyranny of her stepmother were becoming unbearable. She wanted courage to drag out day after day of this dreary monotonous life, knowing too well it was only a joyless postponement of the sacrifice she must at last make. Her books had been taken away from her, her play, her English lessons, the companionship of her father; now they were taking away the nurse who had been like a mother. What was life worth under these conditions? What happiness did her respite of four years promise? How could the misery of the future be worse than the misery of the present?

Nancy, like most children, could not appreciate the immense distance of years which still lay ahead, time enough to make the sorrows of her teens seem slight reason for tears. Her sadness of the moment loomed eternal. The girl was swept by a gust of despair when she thought of her own plight and heard the frightening echoes of her father's debasement, the father whose sordid state she could only guess because every effort she made to be of help only estranged him further. She was in a mood to be desperate. If she did no good to herself, her consent, however rash it might be, had at least this merit in the good it was doing for the nurse she loved so well.

"Yes," she said, glad to feel she was active again, "I will do as you wish: I will tell my father, as soon as he sends for me, that I wish to be married this year. But you must do your part of the bargain."

"You can depend upon me for that," answered the t'ai-t'ai, taken aback, even after Nancy's long silence, by this sudden pleasant sequel to a proposal offered wholly at random. She had never dreamed that Nancy would comply. Truly, these foreigners were unsearchable. Nancy's one bitter satisfaction from the scene was in noting the t'ai-t'ai's bewilderment, the t'ai-t'ai's sense of being baffled, even in her moment of triumph, by the simplicity of the girl who had promised on point-blank request what she herself had been preparing months of subtle intrigue to effect.

"You must prepare the way," Nancy added, "if you want me to speak to my father. I cannot go to him outright and say I wish to be married. I am not so shameless as that."

"It isn't shameless for foreigners to discuss these things," the t'ai-t'ai reassured her. "Nothing is shameless for foreigners."

"I am not a foreigner," Nancy answered sharply.

The t'ai-t'ai was equal to the task. Although she had not expected Nancy's compliance, for weeks she had been drumming into Herrick's ears, through Kuei-lien's insinuating lips, the thought that Nancy ought to be wedded. The father, at first, had listened humorously as though he read the jest of Kuei-lien's envy. But insistence had forced the notion into his brain. He began to argue it with himself and then with his concubine.

"Why should I make my daughter unhappy for your amusement?" he protested.

And now Kuei-lien was able to say, "It is her own wish."

"It is, is it?" scoffed the father. "Very well, we shall see."

He summoned his daughter.

"Nancy," he said, "you know perhaps that when I arranged your betrothal I did this on condition that you should not be married till you were twenty. I wanted you to enjoy the last few years of your childhood in the freedom your mother had. And I did not choose to deprive myself too soon of your companionship. I haven't had so much of your companionship as I looked for, but—well, we won't go into that. My illness has upset matters. But now Kuei-lien astonishes me by saying you don't want this freedom, that you are tired of your father's home and wish to be married. Never mind the delicacy or indelicacy of the question, but just tell me frankly, is this true?"

"It is true," answered the girl, speaking quickly lest time to think alter her reply. She needed more than her old amah's reprieve, so suddenly given, so unbelievingly accepted, to hold her steady to the promise she had made; she needed new symptoms of the willful spirit which urged her to risk her life's happiness all on the prospect of change. The symptoms were not to be depended on; they might fail. She used them while they lasted, and said, "It is true."

"You mean you wish to be married, you would rather be married than to wait?"

"Yes."

Seldom had Herrick imagined his heart torn as by this terse reply. He took it as a mark of Nancy's immense ingratitude. Had he not been vexing himself cruelly over her future, picturing the sorrow, the loneliness and homesickness which even the best-laid plans must bring to pass, desperately trying to convince himself that he had done only right in betrothing the child; and now she was stretching out her hands for what seemed in her eyes to be only a glittering toy. He was saddened, disappointed. He had never thought Nancy could be so fickle. His vanity was hurt. He had never believed his daughter, the object of long-drawn-out concern and anguish, could so quickly, almost flippantly, resign the father who had loved her.

Her own self, as he remembered her from tender moments of a summer gone by, cried out against the words she had spoken. She had wanted, so she once said, to remain "like this forever—forever." Now she denied these words. She had no feeling, no affection. She was shallow, inconstant, humbugged by one whim to-day, by another gaudy whim to-morrow, no better than the tattling women round her. Well, it showed the folly of being anxious about the sorrows of other people, even of one's own children. "I am at least rid of this worry," thought the man in his anger.

"Just as you please," he said coldly. "If you wish to be married, married you shall be—and soon."

CHAPTER XX

Nancy now became the least important personage in the household. She was the centre, it was true, round which the preparations of the t'ai-t'ai were grouped, but she had discarded her personality when she surrendered this last right to hold her destiny an arm's length away. Now she was merely the prop on which to hang scarlet bridal garments. The old impersonal traditions of the past, which weighted and stiffened all that had to do with so human and pathetic an act as the sending a maiden out from the home of her father, hung heavily from her slight shoulders. The rite, promising so welcome a break into the monotony of the women's quarters, filled every mind, but there remained little thought or sympathy for the girl who was the cause of it all.

The t'ai-t'ai had given her husband no time to change his mind. She had sent the news at once to her brother, urging upon him haste in choosing the festive date. This the family of the bridegroom were prompt to do. They called in the fortune-tellers once more and, with their sage advice, settled upon a day, the twenty-fifth of the eighth moon, soon after the autumn festival, a date practical besides auspicious, because the bills for this expensive event need not be met till the New Year.

Nancy heard the news quietly and regarded the preparations going forward as though they belonged not to herself but to another. The amah, whom she had saved, took her reprieve with stolid surprise. She thanked the t'ai-t'ai and said nothing more. She seemed thoroughly cowed by the narrowness of her escape and was more discreet than she had ever been, taking care to leave Nancy alone lest she appear to interfere with the cherished schemes of the t'ai-t'ai. Yet she did much thinking. She was not blind to the mystery of the change in her fortunes, but quick enough to connect it with the openly mooted rumor that Nancy herself, incredible though it was, had asked to have the day of her wedding hastened. She thought and brooded, but there was no one to whom she could appeal.

Nancy was silent. Her father showed signs of renewed illness; he grew haggard and lean, took no care for any company except Kuei-lien's, abused her in spells of morbid cruelty and then fell back, terrified and choking, a prey to the attacks of heart disease which were recurring more and more often. The man had given up hope of living much longer.

"I will enjoy myself while I last," he vowed.

Kuei-lien was both his passion and his doom. He was jealous of every moment she spent out of his sight. He planned, in his more evil moments, to kill his concubine before he died so that she should not have the satisfaction of practising upon others the wiles she had practised upon him. He hated her and adored her, and for hours satiated his hunger for the receding beauty of life by the sight of her clad in the most splendid garments he could command, stiff golden brocades, satins dyed to match the dissolving gray of the eastern sky at dawn, lustrous fabrics surpassed by the cool skin of the girl, fabrics forgotten when Herrick looked at the poignant loveliness of her face, features of a candid delicacy on which the lust and greed of the world seemed to have written no trace. She sang the old haunting songs of the farmer and the fisherman and the scholar and the hermit in his mountains, verse after verse, with an artlessness which was incomparable art, the pathetic innocence of a child. There were times when Herrick's gloomy room was lit up by the splendor of Kuei-lien's beauty, when the concubine herself, great in the austere perfection of her presence, was not great enough to vie with the golden illusion she created.

Often the pain of these supreme illusions drove the man into frenzy; at other times it quieted his heart, as though there were nothing more to be satisfied with in life. His spirit grew numb. Caught by Kuei-lien's enchantment, he nodded his head, fell drowsily asleep, thinking what bliss it would be never to wake, but to stay lulled through eternity by the vision he had seen. Yet he always woke, and always from disturbed dreams in which Nancy unaccountably had taken the place of Kuei-lien and reproached him with a slow smile on her lips. She kept jerking him back to life, jerking him back when all his senses were slow and his eyes ready for sleep.

"There will be no peace till she is married," he said, "and I wonder if I shall have peace then."

On the impulse of a moment he decided to atone to his children for the neglect of a year. They should have one more summer in the hills.

"She shall have one more happy summer and be free as the wind," he said.

Against the violent protests of the t'ai-t'ai, he stuck to his plan, but as a sop to his wife he added Li-an to the party, and off to the Western Hills he went. Kuei-lien, Nancy, Edward, the amah, they all went along, rubbing their eyes to see the willows still hanging low over the ditches, the two camels grazing where they grazed twelve months ago,—they seemed hardly to have moved in the seasons which had intervened,—and to gaze, with the rapture bred of imprisonment within walls, upon the vast, gentle color of the mountains.

While their chairs toiled over the hills, Kuei-lien sang fragments of old songs; her voice was tender as the evening light. Much though the bitterness which had grown between them, Nancy could not help loving the other girl in this hour of sunset because there came forth from her tones that sadness of the human lot which was common to them both.

"The falling sun glows upon crumpled mountains,
Making every ridge gold, every deep valley amethyst;
The bamboos fling plumed heads like spray at the foot of the cliffs;
Vainly their waves sweep round the crimson walls of the temple;
Up the slope winds the path;
Peasants, balancing great loads, sing as they climb.
Ah, their songs are all of heaviness and burdens."

Nancy looked with pondering eyes upon the wild upper meadows; illuminated they seemed, not only by the sun but by the words of the song which went so close to their heart. With redoubled intensity came the longing to sink her spirit in these tranquil scenes, to make them her home where she might dwell with the flowers she had worshiped. Tears swept like rain across her face; she bowed her head and wept. There was no cure for the unhappiness she felt. She had plucked the flowers and tossed them aside; so men would deal with her.

"Being scoffed at as a fool, I bury the flowers,
Yet know not who in other times will bury me;
In a morning the spring is finished, the crimson colors are old;
Flowers fall, men perish; both are known no more."

So she quoted the words of Tai-yü and dreamed that she too shared the fate of that pitiful heroine whom life had dowered with too burning a capacity for passion, too great and destroying joy in beauty.

This was not the way Herrick meant his daughter to begin her last free summer. The next morning, early, he sent for her, and in the room Nancy remembered so well, with the sun pouring blithely through the window, the rustle of trees, the noise of the brook at full traffic, sounds carried crisply on the air of a young vigorous day, amid these things which belonged more intimately to the room than its furniture, the father explained how careless of trouble he wished his daughter to be.

"This is our last summer together," he said, "and I have planned this summer for you. Perhaps I have been harsh at times, and not always fair; it is difficult to be fair when one is ill. I truly do not wish to lose you, Nancy, but—well, you know how things have happened. Nothing can happen but what the gods allow. We can't question fate. So let's enjoy ourselves as though no shadow hung over us. I want you to crowd a lifetime of happiness into these months, for it's no use disguising from you, my child, that you will have burdens in the future; happy though you may be, you will have burdens. I've scandalized your stepmother by bringing you here: she thinks you ought to be sitting at home sewing. But I don't want my daughter to spend her last months of childhood as a seamstress. This is your summer, Nancy, you are to be free as you wish. No one is to hinder you. I make no rules, impose no conditions. I only ask you to be happy, be the child that you ought to be at your time of life, and not give a moment's worry to what must come afterward."

He gave the silent girl a glance of affection which seemed to have taken twenty years from his age. The thinness which had come upon him of late enabled one to guess how fine his features once must have been.

"Come, Nancy," he said softly, "don't stay so solemn. Can't you give your father just one smile?"

In response to his begging Nancy's face lightened. Her eyes displayed such a look of perfect confidence that the father felt himself privileged never to forget what he had seen, for he had seen the mother herself given back to him for a brief moment from the region of shadows. The look spoke thoughts deeper than anything the girl knew or could frame in words: it spoke of a trust, an understanding, which would live between father and daughter, no matter what sorrows, no matter if death itself interposed. Separation would come, but never could they be truly separated. This was the loyalty Nancy offered. It was not entirely a smile; it had too much of the unearthly radiance of clouds which flame at dawn before a tempest; but it satisfied her father and filled his heart.

CHAPTER XXI

The days in the Western Hills were always to be associated with the singing of birds. In the first hours of the morning they began their blithe chattering; the maples and locusts rang with their notes, notes of many modes from the raucous shriek of the jay, the screech of the oriole, as he plunged recklessly like a yellow meteor into the leafy branches, through a gamut of whistling and twittering, of doves cooing and cuckoos never tiring of their two-syllabled speech, to the liquid trills of the myna, whose efforts were a challenge for the birds of the temple to emulate.

It was time for Edward and Li-an to tumble joyfully through the dewy grass and for Nancy to follow them when once the canaries were awake in their bamboo cages, swelling their throats to tell the animation of clear sunshine while the starlings with their split tongues discoursed the news of the day.

Nancy could not go wholly back to the past. Li-an was a more congenial playmate for Edward. The mountains were so new to her that she was willing to believe all the elaborate mysteries the boy invented and to do her part manfully in digging for treasure.

The atmosphere of the household was one of calm. Even Kuei-lien seemed to have no ends of her own to pursue and kept her master's affections in a tranquil key as though she herself wished some holidays after the hectic winter she had spent. The settlement of Nancy's fortunes gave every appearance of having wiped off the score between the two girls so that a friendliness of the old sort thrived; many a hot afternoon they spent together in comfortable abandon, content to discuss only those topics they could treat gayly.

Nancy made the most of her father's license and seldom was there favorable weather that she did not climb by narrow paths to the top of the ridge where she could fancy the whole wide world at her feet. She did not guess, though her instinct must have taken knowledge, that she might meet the friend who held his dark corner in her memory. Nasmith was not likely to return to the Western Hills without some effort to see whether Herrick's strange family were occupying their temple. He upbraided himself for folly, but it became more and more his habit to excuse himself from Beresford's too cheerful company and to lurk in the outskirts of the house where he had declined his chance with such justifiable weakness the year before. He tried to condone his curiosity on grounds of plausible interest, yet he felt always too much the spy to knock openly at the door, so that days passed before he knew the Herricks really had returned. This news he did not even dare tell his family, but he hovered like a discontented spirit on the hills above, straining his eyes for impossible glimpses of Nancy, and then, one afternoon, as he was bound to do, came upon her sitting in a pocket of rock high above the ravine. She did not hear him approach.

"Good afternoon, Nancy," he said, "it is a long, long time since the happy day when we met. You don't go roving any more to temples."

The girl gave him a startled glance. A look of momentary fear gleamed in her eyes. Gladness came next, and then misery. The wind had blown her hair in disarray over her forehead till it was like a veil behind which her thoughts seemed to hide. Nasmith longed to draw them out from their covert, to see whether they were happy thoughts, whether they dwelt with contentment on the betrothal by which they were bound. There was an instant when his senses laughed at control, when he felt it his duty and his right to carry off this girl in defiance of all pledged engagements; and had he realized what Nancy herself did not realize, that she sat there with the implicit hope of meeting him, he might for once have acted upon his senses; but she seemed so unapproachable, so cool, in the alien shape of her garments, the white grass-linen which clad her slender body, that the thought of loving her from nearer than a distance became sacrilege.

"I only come here," said Nancy, and smiled a little; "I don't go to temples any more."

"And you don't play cricket any more, I suppose?"

"Oh, no, I never learned cricket."

"And what do you do?" Nasmith inquired. "How do you pass the time?"

"I come here to read—Edward is noisy sometimes—and I like to see the mountains."

"Won't you ever come to see us again? My nieces ask about you and talk about you day after day."

"No, I can't do that now. My father would not like it."

"But he was very friendly last year and this spring he asked me to do some important business for him."

"Yes, but I am not so free as last year."

"Why?"

Nancy found this question hard to meet even in English; in Chinese she never would have dreamed of answering. But foreigners, she had understood, discussed these things without reticence.

"My father has promised me to be engaged, to be married."

"Yes, but that is four—or is it three—years away."

"No, I am to be married soon—in two months."

Nasmith looked at her in dazed unbelief.

"Your father said you were not to be married till you were twenty."

"I changed that—I asked to be married earlier."

Nancy went on quite naturally from one confession to the next, talking frankly on the banned subject as though thirteen years of Chinese life had not forbidden fear. She liked the thrill of breaking such unwelcome news to the friend she trusted so oddly.

"You changed it! Do you like the thought of this marriage?"

"I don't know—I was tired of the house, tired of the women, tired of sewing."

"And do you think that there won't be a house and women and sewing after you are married?"

"They will be different."

It was pleasing to meet someone who thought of her part in the bargain that had been made.

"Different!" exclaimed Nasmith. "Ah, Nancy, it will be worse drudgery than anything you have known. You speak like a child. You don't know what you are saying. Do you think marriage is play?"

"I have to be married. My father said so."

"Do you know what your father did?" said the man, emboldened by his pity. "Do you know that your father offered to marry you to me?"

This was a question the girl was wholly unready to face. The swift progress of their conversation had carried her too far.

"And I refused," said Nasmith, determined to have it out, "I refused because he asked impossible terms. He wanted to keep you till you were twenty, would not let you go to school as I asked, would not let you be brought up with my nieces. I was a fool. I should have kept my claim upon you. You are not Chinese, Nancy, you have no right to be Chinese. And now you are to be thrown away because of my obstinacy and your father's blindness."

"You are not my father," said the girl indignantly; "he is not blind. I am Chinese. I am Chinese—I must go home. I talk too much."

She stood up. Anger and despair fought in her brain. She felt helpless before Nasmith's outspoken manners, a prey to her stupid frankness in encouraging him.

"Don't go," begged the man. "I suppose you think I am rude, but I had to speak out my mind. It is our Western way, you know. I keep forgetting you are not used to it. I can't keep quiet when I see anything as wicked as this marriage to which you are being sacrificed. If I went to your father to-day, don't you think he would hear me? If I told him to have his own way, to keep you where he pleased till you are twenty, couldn't we break this engagement?"

"We don't break engagements," the girl answered proudly. She turned cool, almost cold in her firmness, now that Nasmith had been betrayed into what she felt was a dishonorable weakness. "My father doesn't change and I don't change. We have promised."

"Fiddlesticks! Engagement is not marriage. It was your father's first wish, remember, that I should marry you."

"My father has told me his wish. I am engaged."

"Can you read this?" persisted the man, drawing from his pocketbook a copy of the scrolls Herrick had written. "This is what your father wrote. Can you read it?"

Nancy looked at the paper curiously.

"Did my father write this for you?" she asked.

"Yes, he wrote it for me last year, the day when we brought you home from my sister's house. He told me these characters had a meaning for me if I could understand them."

"They have a meaning," the girl admitted.

"What meaning?"

"You are the sun," she said.

"Of course; but who is the moon?" he demanded.

"I was the moon—then—last year."

"You are still the moon," he declared. "They were not written merely for last year."

Nancy did not answer him. The copied characters of the scroll had been like a glimpse into her father's mind. She had played so long with these riddles as to be profoundly moved by what she saw so clearly her father had meant to be prophecy. Great was her reverence for the written word. She was like the Chinese who will not allow even a scrap of printed paper to be trodden underfoot, like the governor who forbade newspapers to be used for wrapping parcels because this was treating characters shamefully, showing despite to the very means of the culture which sages and poets had labored to create. For scrolls her deference was superstitious. They were oracles, working out their own mystical fulfillment. Versed as she was in their subtlety, in their history, in the earth-shaking powers of a single well-written character, the byplay of allusion which had torn down dynasties or raised men to favor with the Son of Heaven, she looked with fear and bewilderment upon her father's message as though she were reading a mandate of the gods, for the scroll expressed her father's belief and his wish that she should be the wife of this stranger from the West.

"I am engaged," she repeated as though she were defying heaven. "We have promised!"

Nasmith saw this could not be argued further. More words only would make the girl stubborn, perhaps lose him the chance of seeing her again.

"Very well, we won't debate the matter," he said, "but do you think your father would let you come to stay for a few days with my sister—and your brother, of course? My nieces will never be satisfied to miss seeing you; if they heard I had met you, they would send me back for you. And this is not the request of a stranger, you know. After all, I am almost a guardian. You will come, won't you?"

"Why?"

Nancy was in a contrary mood.

"Why?" echoed Nasmith impatiently. "Why? I should not have thought you needed to ask that question. Does not your memory suggest reasons enough? After all, Nancy, you won't find friends so plentiful in this world that you can afford to neglect those you have."

"Perhaps Edward can come," she admitted, "but if I can come—I don't know. It is different for me because I am engaged."

"Will you ask your father?" Nasmith persisted.

"Yes, I will ask him," said Nancy; and away she went swiftly, like the quiet, swift descent of evening.

Nasmith did not try to follow, although it was high time for him to be swinging into his sturdy stride homeward. He felt as much amazed by the riddles as Nancy herself. Suddenly it occurred to him that this was only his second meeting with the girl—two meetings, and these a year apart. He could not account for the intense feeling which made him still loiter in this spot as though all that was real of her were lingering with him. He could not understand the attraction which held him. Was there real insight, after all, expressed in those words whose meaning with baffling enlightenment he now realized?

The sun moving to the west kindles a splendid beacon for the moon;
The moon following from the east tenderly displays the
        reflection of the sun.

Or had these words, slowly maturing in his mind, worked their own desire for fulfillment? He loved these mountains the sun had painted in broad sweeping colors, to which night was hurrying to put in shadow. He regarded them tenderly; they seemed to breathe of Nancy, to sing of Nancy, with the old time-worn cadence of the land whose tongue she had learned. Ah, what a beacon he could light for her, what a splendid beacon he must set blazing! She could not, she should not, be lost to him!

So the serene glow of evening had helped him find himself, had made him resolute, had sent him home resolute, after a year of fighting shadows.

Nancy, in her own way, was tranquil. The habit of taking life as it came enabled her to speak simply to her father about this meeting with Nasmith and about his request. The father was still indulgent. He did not need to remind himself of his promise; this was Nancy's summer. He had screwed his will to its final pitch when he consented to the date of her marriage. Nothing more seemed to matter; nothing more was he willing to debate. Let life run as it chose.

"I see no harm in it," he said, dealing with Nasmith's invitation. "Mr. Nasmith is a man I trust and his family, so far as I met them, are delightful. The change will be good for you both. I will send a man the first thing in the morning to tell them you are coming, and by the afternoon the chairs can be ready for you to start. Amah of course must go. They're sure to have room for her."

In this matter-of-fact way Herrick granted the request as though it were business of no concern. Nancy was not so sure. She too could not rid her memory of the prophetic lines her father had written. The words had caught in her brain. She repeated them till she fell asleep and repeated them again in the morning when her spirit had become infected by Edward's growing excitement. With great ado the little procession set out, the amah waving more farewells than a traveler bound across the ocean. Nancy was not insensible of the bustle. She was both glad and afraid, timid and joyful, but she abandoned her body to the motion of the chair, lying back with eyes half closed, while the sun beat hot through the screened window. She was content to let her spirit be carried, like her limbs, with the inertia which leaves every directing impulse to destiny. "The sun—the moon; the moon—the sun—t'ai-yang, yueh-liang; yueh-liang—t'ai-yang," the words made their own drowsy refrain to the slogging pace of the coolies.

Deep was the silence which had fallen over the deserted household. Herrick had not realized how much he would miss these children whom never before had he allowed to go away from their home. The sun shone vacantly on the temple; in the evening he walked with Kuei-lien in the moonless dark, passing the tomb of the monk and standing pensive on the little platform which overhung the ravine. He was like a lonely child, but afraid of something worse than the loss of Nancy and Edward, afraid of the solitariness of death, which seemed to threaten him from the deep shadows of the mountains.

Kuei-lien too felt the spell and did little to cheer him. The song she sang was sad, the old tragic tale from The Three Kingdoms of the first break in a brotherhood, which had become classic, the brotherhood of the Peach Orchard, wherein three heroes had stood gayly steadfast to each other through years of war, only to be separated by death at the last. She sang the story Herrick knew so well and loved for its sombre beauty: how Liu Pei, King of Shu, had wakened from troubled sleep to see the ghost of his blood-brother, Kuan Yü, not knowing it was a ghost, not knowing he had been slain.

A cold gust of wind blew in his chamber; the lamp flickered and became bright again. Liu Pei looked up and saw a man standing behind the lamp.

"What man are you that comes in the dead of night to my chamber?"

The man did not answer. Liu Pei, in alarm, got up to look. It was Kuan Yü who was hiding behind the shadow of the lamp.

Liu Pei exclaimed:—

"Ah, my brother, have you been well since we parted? You must have great reason to come thus in the depth of night. You and I are the same bone and flesh; why do you show this deference?"

Then Kuan Yü wept and said:—

"Brother, raise your armies and avenge me. Wipe my wrongs clean as snow."

He finished speaking. A cold wind arose. He had vanished. Suddenly Liu Pei awoke; and it was a dream.

Kuei-lien's voice made the tragedy seem real to her master—the terror of that awakening. She told how at the third watch Liu Pei sent for his minister, K'ung Ming, whose strategy and knowledge of the stars and unworldly faithfulness had won him this kingdom in the west. K'ung Ming tried to comfort him out of his fear, but when he had left the presence of the King he met a friend who told him that there were evil rumors abroad about the fate of Kuan Yü. Then K'ung Ming unburdened his heart.

"To-night I have seen a sign in the heaven," he confessed. "I saw a star fall over Chingchou and I know that Kuan Yü has met with evil there. But I am afraid of my master's grief and dare not tell him."

Even while the two were speaking a man suddenly came forth, caught hold of K'ung Ming's sleeve and said:—

"If there is evil news, why do you deceive me?"

K'ung Ming looked; it was Liu Pei.

"Why do you distress yourself over uncertain news?" he said. "Why let yourself be so unprofitably sad?"

Liu Pei answered:—

"I and Kuan Yü have sworn to live and die together. If he has fallen, how can I stand alone?"

Then, one by one, disturbing the peace of the night, came messengers.

"Kuan Yü is defeated."

"Kuan Yü is betrayed."

And, before it was light:—

"Kuan Yü is slain."

Liu Pei, when he heard it, gave one great cry and fell fainting to the ground.

Herrick listened as though these things had not happened centuries and centuries ago, as though the three men still whispered beneath the flickering torches of the palace. He saw the King cast down by his mighty grief to the cold stones of the pavement. It was as if Kuei-lien herself had sung away the Golden Age and its heroes. He turned to the girl; her face was almost luminous in the dark. His heart was too burdened for speech. She had sung away his own Golden Age, sung away his lustihood and strength.

"Why do you deceive me, ah, why do you deceive me, Kuei-lien?" he asked sadly, echoing Liu Pei's words with a meaning which the girl understood for a moment, but never understood again.

CHAPTER XXII

Long before this Nancy was happily asleep. Thoughts of sun and moon had gone glimmering before the joy of her welcome. Helen and Elizabeth and their uncle had come far along the road to meet the chairs of their guests and out they pulled Nancy and Edward for a gay walk home. It was so like their coming a year ago and so different, the same dusky winding down the mountain path to the settlement, the same bright lights and noise of music from a score of summer homes, the glimpse of the verandah through the trees with servants bustling to set knives and forks on the table. But Nancy came now without fear, like one who had her own place in this merry family. She welcomed Mrs. Ferris's arms and Mrs. Ferris's kisses and followed the chattering twins to the room she was to share with them.

Not even dinner could frighten her, nor her place of honor at Nasmith's right. She caught sight of the amah's face beaming through the door and infectious echoes of her laughter over being once more, after all these years, with people whose ways she understood. The old servant was holding forth princely gossip in the kitchen and the same light-hearted key prevailed in the conversation of the table, so that Nancy's eyes glowed and her lips broke into more smiles than they had shown for months. Hosts and guests, one and all, as if by unquestioned consent, had put away troubling thoughts and forgotten the sorrows of the morrow in the joys of the day. Beresford's quips were never more brilliant. Even Nasmith himself forgot his pain and was satisfied to have Nancy next to him, where he could watch glints of light from beneath her long eyelashes as she answered the amused irony of his sentences.

By common arrangement it was decided that Nancy and Edward must be English during the two weeks of their visit. Yet it was a surprise to the man who hardly dared admit himself her lover when he saw the girl in the morning. Elizabeth and Helen had repeated their magic and led out a maiden who, save for a little hesitating awkwardness, might have belonged to the West through all her seventeen years. Edward with his usual carelessness of clothes had slipped easily into shirt and trousers, but Nancy wore her dress of blue muslin with a deliberate grace which charmed the attention of those who watched her walk slowly forward. The curve of her throat had never had fair play behind the high collar of her Chinese jacket; her hair was gathered loosely from her forehead and bound round her head with just that effect of wind-blown negligence which the twins, who had shared between them the task of dressing their guest, delighted in as the conspicuous triumph of their labor. But the girl still moved stiffly, not quite sure of herself before Nasmith's approving glance, not quite sure of her bare arms and the tenuous clothing of her legs, a little frightened for the exiguous under fabrics into which they had made her step, not thoroughly certain the men could not read the secret of these dainty garments and how insecurely they seemed to cling to her shoulders. She kept her hands stiffly at her sides lest her skirts, by which she was embarrassed enough to expect any mischief, part company from the black silk stockings which overreached her knees.

Helen and Elizabeth laughed at her qualms. They could not believe that trousers seemed more modest to Nancy than the very ordinary rough-and-tumble dress in which they had clothed her. As they predicted, her shyness soon passed, her shyness before all except Nasmith. On him her eyes persisted in lingering, yet she always flushed when he turned to look at her. The enigma of the couplet her father had written still drew her fancy toward him while it made her as quickly anxious to hide. And Nasmith, much as he tried to be cool, could never disguise his interest in this pale stranger who for the breadth of a year had lived like an incessant trouble in his brain.

His nieces, however, for the first few days took command of their guest. They postponed talk of Nancy's marriage,—they could not bear to broach the subject nor to think of it,—and gave up the time to picnics and swimming parties and tennis. Nancy enjoyed the long walks, the start in the cool of the morning, the chattering climb to some far-off temple where the trees provided shade and the bushes, tangling among boulders, gave covert in which the girls swiftly stripped off their clothes and climbed into swimming suits for an hour's diving and splashing in a clear warm pool. Though she envied them, she never could quite be persuaded to join them. Edward emerged fearlessly and was soon out with the men, swimming like a young spaniel, but his sister allowed herself only once to be led charily to the brink of the pool. She enjoyed watching the others at sport, the glossy figures of the girls as they climbed dripping on to the rocks, the antics of Beresford, who swam under water and seized his shrieking victims by the ankles, Nasmith's supple strength, which helped him, without apparent effort, to outdistance the whole of them in the length of his dives and the swiftness of his stroke through the water.

Then came tiffin, spread on a white cloth beneath the pines. There was a fastidious vein in Mrs. Ferris's nature which would not let her dispense with what she called the decencies of life, so that these meals, to the scoffing amusement of her brother, never lacked the cloth and the dishes or the glittering silver—she would die from starvation rather than eat without them, Nasmith declared. Nancy heard the approving comment of the old amah, who was telling the other servants that it was just this way that the first Mrs. Herrick, the real Hai t'ai-t'ai, used to serve picnics in those palmy days when she reigned as first Lady of Amoy. Nancy tried hard and gravely to connect this actual link with the legend of her mother.

Luncheon was followed invariably by a long, drowsy nap. This Nancy liked best of all, for she could stretch herself luxuriously in the shade of the bushes and talk idly with Helen and Elizabeth till the sun, shining through the leaves, filled her veins with its warmth and beguiled her into sleep. The birds sang more lazily, the breeze barely stirred the pines, the water went deviating through the rocks with a silver tinkle, the heat glimmered before her half-shut eyes; she would wake to find it was tea time and the girls hastily combing their hair or tightening the garters round their stockings. Then she too would jump up, shake her dress free of pine needles, dash cold water into her face, and hurry to take her place beside the festive cloth.

At tea time the party was always at its gayest. The picnickers lay or sat cross-legged on the ground and watched the golden sparkle of the tea as it was poured into cup after cup. The steaming liquid refreshed their spirits, gave them appetite for sandwiches and dainty frosted cakes. Nancy was so happy that she did not think of herself as a stranger but fell easily into family ways and smiled at the family jokes, at the teasing of the twins and their changeable-mooded sister, Patricia, who was blossoming into a child of mercurially gay and serious fancies. Edward adapted himself even more quickly; he both teased and was teased, flinging off banter as he flung the spray from his forehead when he was swimming.

He could swagger and brag up to the last inch of David's schoolboy manner. But Nancy, though she was a laughing partner to all this jesting, never quite became fair target for their jokes. Her destiny lurked, unspoken of yet not unregarded, in her eyes.

Nevertheless, she was braver than the others in putting it out of mind, and no one could have told, from watching her walk blithely home, now talking with one, now with another of the party, that a heavy doom hung over her, a doom which made the unpredictable future of her companions seem play by comparison. It was apparent, of course, how the interests and affection of the whole family hovered round her, but then she was singularly lovely; her grave beauty had been made to attract interest and affection.

She was enjoying herself, wholly careless of the passing of time, only content that days like these should go on forever. She looked eagerly for the lights of the bungalow gleaming through the trees, then the bustle, the washing, the changing of clothes for dinner. Such was the magic of the twins, who rifled their wardrobe between them, that she would appear in delicate silks trailing halfway to her ankles, a circle of amber beads flashing their fire at her throat, a ribbon of ivory satin half lost in her black hair, but always the pensive look in her eyes, her lips, her whole bearing, which suggested passion and desire so many ages older than the transient fashions she graced.

Nasmith watched her with hungry eyes and it was only Nancy's absorption in her two friends which kept his secret from being guessed. Her attention, for the moment, was gladly filled by the commonplaces which were such a luxurious novelty to her. The gramophone, the games, the bedroom gossip which trespassed on their sleep still made every evening exciting.

On Sunday they took her to the little Anglican church. They expected the occasion to be a great moment in her life, but they overestimated her capacity for religious feeling. The experience was neither more nor less than the many strange practices to which her eyes were being opened. Nancy had heard of the Christians,—she had been reminded that their religion had been her mother's,—but she felt no violent curiosity about their ways. It seemed natural enough that the foreigners should have their own religion, and one god the more was additional security in time of trouble. She thought the altar with its cross seemly enough, so far as she thought of it at all, but she was puzzled by the complications and the uncomfortable formality of the service and wondered why the priest wore vestments of funereal white and black. To the sermon she could give no response, having, even where she understood the sentences, not the faintest clue to its topic.

She did not criticize; no doubt this queer round of prayers and hymns pleased the gods; there were so many ways of pleasing the gods. But her attention was mainly caught by the people who sat round her. The presence of so many foreigners frightened her; she did not like their peculiarities of dress, the untidy personal touches of fashion, the hats of the women with their meaningless flowers and fruits and vegetables, nor did she like the beards and moustaches of the men. Instinctively she drew closer to her friends; she understood them even though she resented the ease with which they joined in this alien worship, but as for the others, they were strangers, no kin of hers.

Her hosts were disappointed because she could give no coherent impressions of the service. Not that their religion was too serious a burden to themselves; but it went with the proper order of things, with the established decencies of life, that they should be called "Dearly beloved brethren" once a week, and the shallowness of their own spiritual education, the very small teaching their Church had given them, the easiness of the demands it imposed, made them squirm at the thought that Nancy, after all, was a heathen. They had never analyzed the term beyond the vague notion that she must worship idols—a really undignified thing to do. They were too ignorant of what they themselves believed to venture into a debate with the girl. So they looked at her with concern, hoping the service might have saved their pains by prompting godly instincts, and feeling chagrin over so blank a failure. They were well-meaning people; they felt the presence of a duty, a duty they were both too helpless and too nice to perform. For a few hours Nancy was lonely and longed to be back in her father's house.

But by Monday religion had been comfortably stowed away for another week and the very faint shadow of misunderstanding between Nancy and her hosts had been dispelled. She was up early, batting a tennis ball with provoking awkwardness, but happy because she and Nasmith beat every combination the family could muster against them. The exercise, the brisk morning air, the smiles and applause of her friends, made her know she was in favor again. The girls would have laughed if they had guessed yesterday's scruples: to think that of all their many differences they should quarrel about religion! A more intriguing subject dawned upon their minds. Nasmith's secret, his passion for Nancy, became suddenly plain to eyes that had been blind.

"I do believe Ronald's in love with Nancy," Helen blurted to her sister. In the first delicious shock of discovery they matched notes. The fact could not be doubted. Although no special indiscretion had betrayed the man, the tale of his gaze which followed Nancy's every movement had spoken too clearly.

"How splendid!" cried Elizabeth. "Why didn't we ever guess it before?"

It was a match so suitable, the girls both agreed, that it ought to have been promoted, even without the convincing proof of Ronald Nasmith's affection. Here was the one acceptable way of saving Nancy.

They rushed to their mother with the news.

"Ronald loves Nancy," they declared in concert. "We are sure of it."

"I know he does," said Mrs. Ferris quietly.

"But why didn't you tell us? We ought to have helped them. What pigs we've been, keeping Nancy all to ourselves!"

"It's Ronald's problem," smiled the mother. "He will have to manage it in his own way."

"But aren't you glad?"

"I am—very glad, if everything turns out well. But it won't be easy. Nancy is in a difficult position, and she is young."

"Everything must turn out well," vowed Elizabeth. "Do you think Nancy likes him?"

"Nancy is a very inexperienced child. How can she know what she likes?"

"She's older than we are," Helen protested.

Mrs. Ferris smiled again.

"You are only children yourselves."

"Pooh, mother," the daughter exclaimed, "don't talk stuff like that to us. You ought to know better. Even Pat wouldn't swallow such old-fashioned language. What do you really think about Nancy? Does she like Ronald?"

"I should not be surprised if she did," Mrs. Ferris conceded, with the amused, secretive look which convinced them that she was stating only half of what she had seen.

"Then we must help them."

"Don't be too impetuous, my dears. I should like Ronald to have Nancy, mind you; she is a very sweet girl. But she isn't free, you know, and unless Ronald is sure of getting her, it might make her miserable for life if she liked him too well. You know how she's been brought up and you know that her father has arranged for her to be married. We have to reckon with the father. And we have to reckon with her too—alas, she is a more obedient daughter than mine. Suppose she should come to love Ronald and then be forced into marriage with that Chinese—what would her life be?"

"But you don't really consider such a ghastly event possible!" cried Elizabeth, her eyes ablaze with indignation. "We've got to prevent it, and this is our chance."

"We have to consider it, whether we wish to or not," the mother answered. For the first time she did not smile. Her eyes were sad.

Despite this reluctant warning, the twins were convinced of their duty to further the match. By fair means or foul it had to be achieved. They were not afraid of Nancy's father nor did they weigh very seriously the fact of her engagement.

"He seemed a nice old man," said Helen, "and if he were likely to disapprove, why should he let Nancy visit us?"

What appalled the girls was the time they had lost, the five precious days in which they had done nothing to help Nancy and Ronald to an understanding. They must make immediate amends, use every occasion to leave the man and the girl to themselves. But occasions did not come so easily as they wished. The habit of even five days could not easily be broken. Nancy seemed to detect each effort at desertion and cling more nearly to her friends. They could not lead her bluntly to Nasmith and say, "There you are; love him." They could only steal away on this pretext and that, but these manufactured meetings left an atmosphere of constraint, so that the girl grew shy in the presence of her lover and seized her own chance to escape. And there was always Patricia or David or Edward in the way. Half an evening was consumed in luring them out of the room, for the younger children, suspicious of being beguiled out of some advantage, like a child enticed to bed when fun is brewing downstairs, held their places with maddening obstinacy.

"I declare," stormed Elizabeth, "marriages may be made in heaven, but I wish there was a little more help in making them on earth!"

CHAPTER XXIII

The visit was almost at its end. The girls were in despair.

"We won't let you go home," they told Nancy. "You must have another week, at least. Surely your father won't mind."

"Perhaps he won't," she agreed, "but I must go back and ask him."

She was no more ready than they were to have her stay finished. Time had gone so swiftly. The first few days she had been careless of its passing, as though she had the leisure of years before her, but now each day was oppressed by the closer approach of the end. It would be the end to so many things, the end to her youth, to her freedom, her all too brief season of play. Nancy wished at times she had never known these friends; she would not have missed them so. Barely a month remained till her marriage. She looked at the moon shining through the trees. Even now it was at the first quarter. The next time she should see it thus, she would be back in Peking, the centre of odious preparation, half enslaved already, and before she could see it again she would be married, hidden in some brawling Chihli village where her mother-in-law might not give her time to watch the slow processions of the sky.

The praise of the twins had awakened a delight in her own beauty. She would stand slowly undressing before the mirror, extending her arms, admiring the rounded softness of her shoulders, the glint of light upon her long silk stockings. She reddened with shame and with fear at the thought of giving her body to the mercy of a stranger.

Not new thoughts were these, but for the first time intimately felt, and by contrast the quick comradeship which prevailed in the Ferris family made their home the treasure-house of all things desirable. Whatever she might predict of her future home, she knew it would not be like theirs. She dared less to think how different it might be. She wanted security. She wanted peace of soul. She wanted the grave trust of a man like Nasmith. She did not know that, with all her rapt joy in the company of the twins, her one desire from waking till sleeping was to appear lovely in his eyes. "I was the moon—I was—" she mused once or twice, and checked herself dreaming before the long mirror.

Nasmith too had come down from counting days to counting hours. A whole ten days with Nancy near—they had promised so much and been nothing but tantalization and sorrow. And now but one day lay before him. The conversation of the dinner table turned to his rescue of Nancy a year ago. Beresford revived the story with sundry mock-heroic touches, descanting upon the execution Edward had done with his bow till he made their intervention seem merely a belated attempt to save the lives of the monks.

"Shall we go back there, Nancy?" said Nasmith, half in play, half trying to veil the bitter seriousness of his eyes, "and see if we can remember it all? It was so long ago, it has begun to seem almost a joke."

His suggestion was taken up eagerly by the girls. They had not consented to thinking of the morrow as Nancy's last day among them; she must win her father's agreement to a longer visit; but, if last day it were, a slight trembling in Ronald's voice told them he would make the most of it. So early the next day they started with all the paraphernalia of these outings to make holiday high among the rocky shoulders of the mountains. The sun shone in broad waves of light down the grassy slopes; the paths were still wet with dew.

"Who shall lead the way?" Nasmith asked.

"You and Nancy, you must be the pilgrims," called out Beresford cheerily.

The twins had trusted him with their secret.

"Do you love Nancy?" Helen had demanded of him the night before. "Yes, of course I love Nancy," he had answered.

"Oh, don't be stupid," the girl retorted, stamping her foot. "Do you love her?"

"I will, if you wish," Beresford answered gallantly.

"Well, I don't wish it. If you're really and truly sure you don't love her, I want you to keep David and Edward in hand when we go to the temple; find a tiger for them, even if you have to buy one—"

"Couldn't I be a tiger myself? I look well in stripes,—some have been ungracious enough to suggest my wearing them permanently,—and if you can give me some hint of how a tiger roars or whether a tiger does roar or merely sits on his hind feet and purrs,—I won't do that, mind you,—"

"I am not joking," Helen broke in. "I want you to keep the boys amused so that Ronald can have a chance."

"Right-o," he said, suddenly understanding. He was a little saddened, for the habit of seeing Nancy was growing on him.

"Well, I'm late in the race," he thought to himself. "I can't complain." So, at Helen's command, he was tactfully alert to every chance of helping what he supposed, in his simple way, were lovers.

"You are the pilgrims," he called, "you must brave the thorny places of the wilderness. Young Edward and I will hold our trusty bows in reserve. If you chance upon peril, give three piercing cries,—you'd better make them two shorts and a long so we won't be led astray on other adventure and fail you in your need,—three piercing shrieks, and we'll tumble to your assistance."

Laughingly Ronald took up his post of guide, with Nancy halfway between him and the twins, while Beresford kept his two young cubs in leash by the sheer interest of his talk, and hallooed cheerfully to Mrs. Ferris to make sure that she and her mountain chair were still pursuing.

"Though fa-int, yet pursuing, we go on our way,"

he would hum, and then break off, reproaching himself with a grimace for such irreverent use of a hymn. Meanwhile the twins, satisfied with the arrangement of the party, slowly widened the interval between themselves and Nancy, very cautiously, of course, not too quickly nor too far, lest the girl suspect, yet far enough so that her walking and talking with Ronald could become the habit of the day.

"Well, here's the grove," said Ronald, at last. Nancy had been taught to call him by his name, "the communism of the family," he had assured her. "Now what shall we do?"

They waited for the party to draw up.

"I smell water," exclaimed Mrs. Ferris.

"There is a stream in a ravine close by," offered Beresford, who had explored these mountains inch by inch with his friend.

"Splendid, just the place we need for tiffin. Tiffin before temples, my dears."

They arrived at the edge of the ravine and slipped down the gravelly path to the rocks below.

"There must be swimming somewhere," said Elizabeth, prying round. Soon shouts and splashing told the story of her success. She and Helen came back, gay and dishevelled, their wet swimming suits under their arms, pulled up Beresford, who had been soberly showing Edward and David how to make whistles from the pliant twigs of the trees, and gayly the family sat down to a meal which had been spread with the usual elegance. They lingered a long time over the coffee, while the men smoked pipes and outdid each other with the stories they told.

"Well, I'm going to sleep," said Mrs. Ferris, finally. "You had better show Nancy her temple, Ronald, before it's too late."

"Will you come and see it?" the man asked.

Something in the eagerness of his voice made her hesitate, but after a long pause she said yes. He got up silently and she followed, while the rest sat watching, with no word to say, for they were wondering in their hearts what the issue would be.

The afternoon was hot and oppressive; a haze was veiling the sun. The pines stood like trees of an enchanted wood. Not a branch moved. The silver trunks glistened in the heat. Nancy was dumb and uneasy as though the sultry weather were laying its spell upon her as it veiled the sun. She knew this was no ordinary chance, this walk, and waited fearfully for Ronald to speak, to break the quiet which lay so heavy upon her breast.

"We are pilgrims, Nancy," he said. "I wish I knew what is to be the end of our pilgrimage."

But he left off talking riddles. A look in the girl's face warned him that the time was not ripe. It was easier to relieve the tense atmosphere with light-hearted mention of that day a year ago when he and Beresford had been walking this selfsame path without thought of the adventure they were to meet. He pointed out the place where Edward had run into them, pictured the monks stopping foolishly a few paces away. He was almost as amusing as Beresford in his way of telling the story, but he had seen more deeply than his friend the tragedy they foiled, so that his words never quite lost the graver tones of a scene which he remembered almost as much with pain as with joy.

"Well, here's your temple," he said at last.

Nancy looked with a slight shock of panic, but the red walls were harmless enough, almost pitiful and desolate, under a sky that was growing gray.

They stopped for a moment before entering. Inside, the temple seemed dark and musty. The monks were asleep. Ronald had to shout before one of them appeared, startled by visitors he had not expected. Nancy recognized him,—he was the younger of the two priests who had welcomed Edward and herself,—but, to her surprise, he gave her only a blank stare. Her Western dress was effectual disguise. Quickly he brought tea and, pulling off the lid of a round black box, gave them handfuls of melon seeds, dried jujubes, cakes of powdered rice. The tea was too hot; Ronald was restless. He got up and studied the musty gods and turned to Nancy, who had too many evil memories of the place to trust her friend out of sight.

"Shall we look at your prison?" he asked.

"No!" protested the girl.

"It is a worse prison you are going to," he commented dryly, "far worse. Why don't you show the same fear for the future that you show for the harmless memory of the past? I saved you from one. Ah, Nancy, why won't you let me save you from the other?"

She looked past him at the gods on their lotus blossoms, and made no answer. Ronald watched her, noted the masses of dark hair piled low round her forehead, the tranced stare of her eyes, the slow curve of her throat, arms half bare, hands far too smooth and supple for the rough-grained table on which they were stretched.

"You were not meant for prison, Nancy," he said gently.

But the appeal of his words was frustrated by the entrance of the monk. Every moment the girl expected his yellow-toothed confederate to appear.

"I can't talk here," she said. "This place hurts me. It chokes me."

The man, however, was unwilling to leave the cobwebbed hall. An unbelievable superstition held him here because this had been the place they had named for their pilgrimage. He felt the influence of the dusky temple fighting his battle in Nancy's heart.

"Don't you see?" he cried in a low voice. "Doesn't this place show you what I mean? Nancy, Nancy, you say it hurts you, chokes you. What chokes you? Just the memory of a danger long ago. What is that compared with the marriage you are facing? A laugh and a smile. If you can't bear to think in this mouldy, decaying place because the walls stifle you with torturing thoughts, what are you going to do when you have no friend, no protection, when life really begins to choke and to hurt—when they lock you into a red chair and send you away to be the slave of strangers?"

"I will stop doing. I will stop thinking," answered Nancy simply, as though deed and thought could be laid away like garments too rich for the everyday wear of life.

"No, Nancy," Ronald demurred, shaking his head, "you will never be able to stop thinking and, worse yet, to stop feeling."

The priest, finding his company unwanted, had withdrawn softly to the next hall and was watching his guests curiously through a crack in the door.

"You can never stop feeling," Ronald persisted.

"You are a Westerner," said Nancy bravely; "you don't understand our customs."

"I understand this much, Nancy, that you don't want to be married in this cruel way any more than you want to die."

In fact he thought she would rather die, but he did not like to say this openly, lest he put the thought into her head.

"One has to marry," the girl remarked calmly.

"Yes, but there are two ways of marrying. You have chosen the wrong one."

"Chosen!" she said indignantly. "I haven't chosen anything. I can't stop the winter from coming, can I? How can I stop being married? When it's time to be married, I'm married."

"You're only arguing to hide your own fear. You know as well as I do that this whole business is ghastly and wrong."

"What should I do?" she asked, vexed by the truth of his words.

"You should break the engagement, tell your father you won't consider it."

"And bring shame to my father."

"Better shame for him than for you. After all, it would only be an artificial shame for him, a short-lived one at that; for you it would be all too real—and lifelong."

Nancy stood up, tired of hearing things she knew too well.

"You are kind," she said, "and it's very simple according to your ways, but these are things that can't be mended by talk."

"Wait," commanded the man, "I haven't even begun to say what I intended. I am not trying to mend a bad matter by talk. There is a better way. I know your father wanted you to marry me, else why should he have offered me the engagement? It was only annoyance, pride, injured vanity, whatever you choose to call it, that made him arrange this other hapless engagement. He has gained nothing by it, not even the terms he tried to exact from me. He has managed to keep you only one of the four years he stipulated. Do you think he is happy over this business into which he has drifted so helplessly? He is no happier than you or I. Ah, Nancy, why can't you see it, why can't you see that worry is killing him—worry over what is to become of you? If you wish to save his life, you must disobey him; you must not go back; you must stay and marry me."

By now Nancy had grown used to this habit of frank speech. Ronald's pregnant ending was outweighed by his accusation that she was killing her father.

"I must go," she said. "I can't think of these things here."

She wanted swift motion to keep time with the wheeling circles of her brain.

"But you cannot go now," cried her lover, suddenly conscious that he had been stamping out his words to the rumbling accompaniment of thunder. There was a bright flash, an ear-shattering explosion; the two stood speechless, stunned, certain the temple had been struck. Then Ronald laughed nervously; he could hear the rain sweeping toward them through the trees; nearer and nearer it came, like the menacing roar of a great wind, till it hissed through the branches and burst upon the tiles of the temple roof with an awful noise, more deafening than the clatter of stones. Lightning seethed round the temple, illuminating the darkest corner with incessant brilliance as bolt after bolt flared down the sides of the mountains; thunder and rain were mixed in an inseparable welter of sound.

"You can't go now," Ronald shouted; "we must wait until the storm has passed on."

He went back and stirred up the frightened monk to bring them more tea. Nancy was sitting with her arms stretched across the table, her hands clenched, her eyes intent upon ghosts she could not see, ghosts of herself and Ronald and her father. Ronald's speech was so terribly plausible, it matched her father's unforgettable couplet—the sun and the moon; the words came back to torment the one paltry bit of peace she had cherished, the peace of obeying her father. She tried to put Ronald out of the debate, to exclude the charm which had been working silent mischief in her heart. She wanted to think entirely of her father, to please him, to save him; the failure of her labored attempts for his safety, the battle she had done against Kuei-lien's schemes, made her look carefully, gravely, at the bewildering implications of Ronald's undreamed-of project, that by defying her father she could make him happy.

The tumult of the storm relieved her of speech. She sat and stared, and let her tea grow cold. The lightning flashed less frequently, but the rain held and the temple was steeped in unnatural darkness, a perilous gloom which oppressed her with hatred of the place. Again, a second time, it had become her prison. Surely there was nothing but mischief in store for the pilgrims who paid their vows here.

"The rain is stopping," Ronald reminded. "Have you any answer to make?"

"I have no answer," Nancy replied.

"Are you going to put all my words aside without a thought?" asked the man in despair.

"I have thought—I have thought many times; but I must go back. My father let me come here; he trusted me. If I did not go back, it would be shame and evil to him. How can I dare to break his promise?"

"Don't you understand, don't you see, Nancy? Must I go over it all again! He doesn't want this marriage. It is only his stubbornness, his obstinacy that makes him cling to it. I showed you his own words, the scrolls he wrote for me; he told me that these were the truth and that the best part of my life would come when I found out the meaning for myself. If they were the truth, then your marriage is false and your father is false to himself, false to his own heart's desire in allowing it. It will kill him; remember that—it will kill him."

Ronald saw that his earnestness had made a deep impression; he hurried to strengthen his advantage.

"And now, Nancy," he went on, "I have read his words, his scrolls, read them for myself, and I know that he was right, that the best part of my life will come not only from understanding them but from realizing their meaning in actual life. You don't belong to the East, Nancy, you belong to the West whence you came; it is my happiness to take you back to the West of your birth. That is my lot and my destiny because I know in my heart I love you. I have been learning this through all the troubled months of the past year. I love you, Nancy; my claim upon you is greater than your father's; it is the claim to which he appointed me. His claim is passing, his life is nearly run. He will die, but we must live."

The girl listened to him in breathless quiet. Tumult, agitation, had frozen her muscles so that her face in the dim light showed neither anger nor joy, merely a ghostly whiteness, an unblinking passivity like the gilded immobile calm of the gods.

"I don't understand," said the girl after a long silence. "You should tell these things to my father, not to me."

"No," protested the man, "it is time to tell them to you, to make you understand. You are not blind, Nancy, you have been with us, you know something of the life I wish to offer you. No hiding away in an ignorant village, no father-in-law and mother-in-law and a whole courtyard of mangy relations tyrannizing over you, but your own home, friends to visit and be visited, and a husband who will love and reverence your slightest wish. Ah, Nancy, how can I tell you these things, how can I make you know that I love you, that life won't be life for me if I cannot have you?"

"These things should not be said to me," said Nancy, her voice burdened with pain. "You are late, late! Why do you say such things when you know it is useless, when you know my father has promised and I have promised? I have no power. I cannot call back spoken words, my spoken words."

"Then you do not love me," said Ronald, in a low, discouraged voice.

"I don't know," faltered the girl, unable to say the one phrase which would have quelled his importunity, unable to accept him, unable to give him up. "I don't understand this—this love."

"You are fighting against your own heart," said Ronald. "You are making the mistake which has tortured your father for years. Give me an answer, Nancy. This is no time for holding to foolish promises; it is no time for dainty, meticulous points of honor. Your father's life rests in your hands. You will hurt him if you don't go back; you will kill him if you do. I don't mind your sacrificing me,—I do mind, of course, but we'll not stop to argue over it,—but will you sacrifice your father? Will you sacrifice yourself?"

Nancy's composure was shaken. She was exhausted by the strain of arguing against everything she desired. Ronald was trying to persuade her to things whereof she longed only too ardently to be persuaded. She was worn out by the thankless irony of defending her own worst interests. She could not deny that she loved Ronald; she could not confess that she did; her heart was in a fever of eagerness to put into his masterful hands the knotted strings of her life, but her will, even when half convinced, balked at an act which, however surely it might lead to her father's ultimate welfare, would be desertion and disloyalty to his trust.

The rain had stopped. There was only the sound of water dripping from the trees to remind her that they must join the others, discover how they had fared in the deluge.

"I cannot say yes, Ronald," she announced in unthinkably clear tones, "and I cannot say no. I don't know what to say. You called this a pilgrimage. Then I am a pilgrim and I shall get my answer as the pilgrims do."

She stood up, pushed back her stool with a clatter which brought the listening monk to the door.

"Get me some incense," she commanded.

One by one she took out the frail sticks from the packet he brought, and round the temple she went, lighting a stick before each god and thrusting it deep into the ashes of the porcelain burner before she did obeisance with clasped hands held stiff in front of her. The eighteen Lo-han she worshiped, Kuan-yin and the gods of the four mountains, at the back, and then returned to the main hall to kneel prostrate before the three lotus-throned Buddhas. Ronald looked on with amazement and dismay at the outrageously incongruous picture of this foreign girl in Western clothes performing an act so unnatural to her appearance. The sight did violence to his imagination, this vision of Nancy with knees pressed upon a dirty prayer-mat of straw, the lace edges of her skirts draggled in the mire, her hair tumbling over her shoulders as she bowed before these pitiless, imperturbable gods. Yet he was too much fascinated by the weirdness of the scene to think of intervening.

The priest had been surprised, too; he had recognized the girl at the first sound of her vigorous Chinese speech. This time Nancy had the upper hand; she gave her commands quickly and clearly so that he was only too prompt to obey. He stood by the bell while she chanted her appeal to the gods, a strange petition that they should tell her whether she ought to obey or disobey her father. Three times she bowed, three times he struck deep full-toned reverberations from his bell. With the last note Nancy seized a round bamboo box from the table in front of her; she shook it and threw the bamboo counters to the floor. The gods must tell her which was right, to go back to her father or not to go back, to yield to the scarlet chair and to Chou Ming-te for her husband or to remain and marry Ronald.

The bamboo counters fell with curved sides uppermost. "No," the gods told her, "you are not to go back."

But the girl could not break her trust even for the gods.

"This is an evil place," she said, turning calmly to Ronald. "I know now that I cannot do what you wish. I must go back as I promised."

Ronald followed her dumbly through the dripping trees. Inwardly he cursed the superstition that could pin a great choice upon the chance fall of two bamboo counters. He was too bitter to speak, bitter over this childish, futile end to their pilgrimage. He was almost ready to despise Nancy.

He never guessed that the gods had been on his side—that the girl had thrown over their advice, thrown over his, thrown over her own.

CHAPTER XXIV

They found the rest of the family where they had left them. A cave to which the storm had driven them had saved the picnickers from the worst of the downpour although the swift rise of the stream had threatened for a few anxious minutes to engulf them. Ronald saw by their faces, however, that their concern had not been over their own plight, but over his; he read their unspoken queries about the outcome of his suit. He had never confided in them and could not confide now.

"We were delayed in the temple till the rain passed over," he explained. The words were enough to show that he had failed. Nancy had a look of proud reserve with which none of them dared meddle.

The picnic ended with drooping spirits; that this was the last hung heavy on the minds of all, the last and too late. Dinner was no merrier. The unspoken failure of the afternoon hushed the usually careless talk. Only Edward and David, who were not imaginative, chattered on in their heroic style, enlarging their remarks to fit the silence which was offered them.

"Ronald, you are a bungler," scolded Elizabeth, when she had a chance of catching her uncle alone.

"A bungler?" echoed the man.

"Yes, a bungler! Don't you suppose we know your secret? We had counted on you, for the honor of the family, to save Nancy."

Ronald gave a wan smile.

"Since you know so much," he said, "how would you save Nancy?"

"Marry her, stupid! Haven't we all been doing everything we could to help you? Why on earth do you suppose we let you go chasing off to that temple by yourselves? Just think of all the trouble we had, reining in David and that impetuous young brother of hers. I am ashamed of you, thoroughly ashamed of you."

Ronald was used to the stormings of his niece,

"It's not nearly so simple as you think, my dear Betty," he laughed, "even with your all-powerful help. Nancy is already engaged and if she thinks two engagements are a complication, what am I to do?"

"What are you to do? What does any man with any pluck do? What does her engagement amount to—you know what it is—to a Chinese! Are you going to sit idle-handed and see her thrown away like that?"

"I haven't sat idle-handed, but when Nancy proves a peculiarly stubborn young lady,—like some other persons I know but won't mention,—that's the end of it. I could hardly follow the precedent of our friends, the monks, and kidnap her."

"Well, kidnapping would be better than letting her go back to that horrible marriage."

"Ah, Betty, I wish the man luck who tries to kidnap you!"

"I suppose I shall have to propose for you," said Elizabeth with a sigh.

"Propose by all means; but don't imagine I have lost Nancy for lack of proposing."

"I can fancy the way you would propose. Drew it up as a brief, no doubt, with preamble, articles one, two, three, and four, and half a dozen 'whereases.' If it had only been Beresford instead of you we might have had some hope of success."

"Unfortunately it wasn't Beresford," said Ronald, and walked away.

Elizabeth had no mind to acquiesce in Ronald's surrender, and throughout a dreary evening, in which the spirit had left the forms of their amusements vacant, her brain was busy with arguments for beating down Nancy's obstinacy.

"This can't really be your last night here," she said, when bedtime had come and she and Helen and Nancy were in the privacy of their own room. "We won't allow it."

"I must go back to my father first," Nancy answered in a firm voice. "I must ask him if I can stay longer."

"Oh yes, I know what that means. It means you won't come back. Honestly, Nancy, doesn't it?"

"Perhaps it does," the other girl admitted.

"And it means you will have to marry that Chinese."

Nancy was startled. The fact of her engagement had always lurked between them, but had never been mentioned. She had hoped this last night might pass without its being mentioned. But the fiery Elizabeth was tired of evasions.

"Doesn't it?" she challenged.

"Yes," Nancy confessed.

"Why?" asked her relentless questioner.

"Because it has been arranged."

"Did you arrange it?"

"No, my father arranged it; that's our custom."

"And are you going to let yourself be handed over to an ugly Chinaman you have never seen just because of your father's whim?"

Helen thought the question a little harshly put and opened her mouth to repeat her sister's words more gently, but Elizabeth frowned her into silence. Nancy's face was white, but the girl was still sufficiently mistress of her lips to answer with an even-toned composure:—

"It is our custom, you see—"

"It is not our custom, and you are one of us, Nancy. It is an unthinkable, disgraceful thing! It is bad enough that you should have had all the best years of your life stolen from you because of your father's selfishness in bringing you up like a Chinese, but to be handed over to a greasy mandarin or coolie or whatever he is, that is more than you have any business to allow. You've got to do something to bring the man to his senses."

"My father is my father," said Nancy, a little stiffly.

"You're going too far, Betty," protested Helen, and then turned to Nancy.

"Don't be offended," she begged. "That's just Betty's way of expressing herself. She's not trying to be insulting. I've known her since she was born, so you must believe me. We are not criticizing your father; he has his ideas and we have ours, but he is old and you are young, and he has lived by himself so long that he probably doesn't know quite what is fair to you. You see you aren't truly Chinese, Nancy; anybody could know that by looking at you. But he has been living so long with his Chinese books and all that,"—gracefully she included the concubines in the "all that,"—"as to have forgotten that you aren't Chinese."

Nancy was mollified, but Elizabeth, once aroused, did not like apologies being made for her own frankness.

"He might at least have tried to find an English husband for you," she declared.

"He did try," said Nancy, enjoying the sensation of her statement.

"He did try? When?" both sisters cried in unison.

"Last year, but—" Nancy added, with a faint spice of malice, "I was—rejected."

A light burst suddenly upon Elizabeth's eyes.

"Do you mean to say he asked Ronald?" she demanded.

"Yes."

This Western game of frankness had its triumphs even in defeat, Nancy was able to observe during the pause which ensued.

"Well, I am—yes, I am damned!" exclaimed Elizabeth. "There's no other word for it. I see it now, and that's why we have had to put up with his hangdog looks all these months. I suppose he submitted a whole code of regulations and provisos, didn't he, and your father was not willing to accept? That's just what he would do."

"I don't know what he did do," said Nancy, shifting to the defense of her lover. "Perhaps my father had his own code of regulations and provisos, if that's what you call them."

"And he never said a word to us," Elizabeth continued. "Oh, why are men so stupid?"

"He is not stupid," said Nancy; "he didn't understand our customs."

"Did he tell you about this?"

"Yes."

"And now, as usual, he's a year too late. He'll be a year too late for his funeral. Look here, Nancy," she asked, with a disconcerting change of tactics, "do you love Ronald?"

A whisper of warning came from Helen.

"Yes, I know it's a beastly question, but you do love him, don't you, Nancy? Of course you can't expect us to reverence our own uncle. We shall have to be foolish over someone else's uncle. We will spare you the mention of all Ronald's endearing little faults if you'll just say you love him."

Her pleasantries saved Nancy the embarrassment of an immediate reply. Her eyes, the sudden rush of blood to her cheeks, might have seemed to give her answer, but the girl's tongue took refuge in the same answer it had given Ronald himself.

"I don't understand this love."

"That's nonsense," vowed Elizabeth; "you know if you love him—and you do love him. It's no use denying it. You daren't look me in the eyes and say you don't."

Nancy evaded the challenge. She did not speak.

"Yes, you do love Ronald," cried her accuser in triumph. "Don't try to hide your face, Nancy dear; I know the symptoms. Now you can't go back."

She spoke as if the matter had been decided and nothing remained except to give Nancy to her lover. But Nancy was not so easily beaten down. She looked quite calmly into the eyes of the friend whom a minute ago she had been afraid to face.

"I love my father," she said, "and I must go back."

Elizabeth gave a gesture of vexation at the stupid way people insisted upon tangling their own happiness. For a moment she was speechless, leaving argument to her less overbearing sister.

"But it isn't as if you were going back to your father," insisted Helen, "not for more than a few weeks. You are going to a husband whom you don't love, whom you have never seen. That is not right, Nancy, not right for you, not right for Ronald, because you do love him and you know it. You are going back just to please an old man, and not to please him for long."

"I am going back to please my father. I want to please him. I don't care how long it is."

"But if he has made a mistake—"

"My father doesn't make mistakes."

"Oh, doesn't he?" snorted Elizabeth, unable to keep out of the debate longer. "What has he been doing all these years but make mistakes? And now he is too selfish, he isn't man enough, to save his daughter from the mess he has made. He has ruined his own life and isn't happy till he has ruined yours."

Nancy's eyes flashed with anger.

"I am going now," she said. "I won't stay in your house and hear such words. My father is right. Everything he does is right. I am not a foreigner. I hate your ways, I hate your ugly clothes, all your talk about love! My father is not selfish, he is not selfish! I won't listen to you. I am going home."

She clutched wildly at her dress. In her passion she was ready to tear off the despised garments. Then suddenly the sense of her own helplessness overwhelmed her and she knew that she had insulted these, almost her only friends in the world. The experiences of the day had been too great for her sorely tried nerves. She had fought against all she desired until there was no strength for battle left in her veins. She was standing, unable to move, wondering where she could go, how she could carry out her frantic threats of flight, when the instantly contrite Elizabeth threw her arms across the shoulders of the distracted girl.

"I was a beast, Nancy," she confessed; "do forgive me, do forget everything I said. I didn't mean to spoil your last evening here, but you seem to belong so much to us that I couldn't bear not to say what I could."

Helen too was plying her with penitent words.

Nancy's anger dissolved under their kindness. Their love touched her heart to the quick. She could not control herself longer; her pride, her anger, her remorse, were swept away in tears. She tried to struggle through a few incoherent phrases, but the tide of weeping drowned speech, drowned thoughts, drowned everything except a devastating pity which convulsed her breast with great heaving sobs and set her weeping again and again after the wells of her eyes had seemed eternally drained of tears.

There was no more the girls could say. They could only let her weep away the bitterness of her heart.

When she got up at the first glimmer of dawn and put on again her Chinese clothes, they did not stop her, for they knew quite well she had not slept and must find her bed wearisome after the vigil of the night. She would be better breathing the cool air of the morning. They let her go alone to purge her brain in the dew and the sunshine of the hills.

"I will be back," Nancy told them, "but I want to walk. I shall feel better; then I can sleep in the chair all the way home."

She hurried round the upper paths of the settlement, passing houses which were heavy with slumber. The morning was still; the sun had not come up over the plains to waken the dragon flies into humming life. Nancy was trying to walk herself out of the desperate mood in which nothing she did seemed worth any pain. She had gained some satisfaction, when she was angry, from the heroism of returning to her father, which of course was only another way of saying to the marriage he had ordained. But now she was not angry, only sad. Her heroism was only like a memory of last night's acting lingering in the stale air, amid the litter and refuse of a stage, the morning after a great tragedy. The actors have gone, the theatre is given up to charwomen. So Nancy's heart was given up to dustpans and brooms. The anguish upon which she had wracked her spirit lay strewn across the floor of her soul like crumpled flowers. It was bad enough to be sacrificing so much that she loved to the demands of duty, but it was worse not to believe in the sacrifice.

In this mood Ronald overtook her.

"I am going back to my father," she announced, as though he had been following the debate in her mind and might try to prolong fruitless argument and score many profitless points.

"I don't doubt it," said Ronald, smiling gravely. "I don't doubt that you are going back. I didn't come to plague you with my efforts at persuasion. I wanted just one last walk with you, Nancy, to be at peace and happy because you are with me. I am wiser than I was yesterday, and I know you would have agreed if you could. So we'll let it rest at that, shall we?"

They walked quietly, enjoying the little things that caught their eyes, the brilliant touches of an early summer morning, "my namesake, the sun,"—as Ronald grimly remarked,—which came up from a saffron bed of clouds, far across the plains beyond Peking. Nancy was glad Ronald had found her. There was an unforced merriment to his talk which cheered her vexed mind. Her doubts vanished like the mist. He was well named "the sun," for his steadfast courtesy in defeat shed light on the misty passes of her will and helped her to see the rightness of the instinct which was taking her back to her father. The mountains had lost their vagueness of surface; the sun was etching the deep shadows of each ravine.

"Well, it is time we went back," said Ronald, after they had walked a long way and seen the sun leap high above the plains. "I am glad we had this walk, Nancy, because I didn't trust myself to say good-bye to you down there. I haven't given you up, you know; I will never do that, for I hope against hope that your father's prediction may yet come true."

He stopped for a moment.

"Ah, Nancy," he said, turning to the girl, "it's so hard, even now, to say good-bye to you."

She looked at him, frightened by the thought of never seeing him again, afraid of his never knowing that she did love him. Impossible wishes were in her heart, impossible words on her tongue, for it seemed so wrong that she should be offering herself only next month to a stranger and parting without a word of endearment for the friend, the lover, who filled the vivid horizon of this morning walk. This Western life and Western speech had been playing havoc with all Nancy's conventions. She was on the point of confessing her love for Ronald, a disastrous confession which could only complicate the unhappiness of their friendship, for she had not changed and would not change her intention of going back to her father as she had said.

"Well, we might as well be done with it," exclaimed Ronald. "It's no time for making speeches, is it? You know how I feel, Nancy. I am not good at disguising my feelings, but I do hope that, whatever comes of all this mixup, you will be happy. That, after all, is the important thing."

Nancy looked away as though her eyes were intent upon the sunlit boldness of the slope. She was too well schooled to betray emotion in the ordinary ways, by nervous play of the hands, by shifting of the feet, but the tense posture of her body suggested to observant eyes the strain she was meeting; Ronald's eyes were too observant to be at ease in watching her. The man turned away. The steadily mounting splendor of the sun gave him courage.

"A priceless pair of fools we are," he said, suddenly, "a priceless pair of fools, mooning like this on such a splendid morning. They'll be wondering if we're never coming to breakfast. Good-bye, Nancy."

He took her hand and held it a moment. The girl thanked him with a grateful look for this brusque loyalty. For the last most difficult time she was able, by his help, to subdue the protesting voices of her blood.

"Good-bye, Ronald," she said quietly.

And so their parting was accomplished.

CHAPTER XXV

Nancy and Edward made a very different return from their homecoming of a year before. The girl would not hear of her friends walking with her; farewells were so painful that she wished to be finished with them, whatever the cost to her feelings, and get what peace she could from the dull melancholy of the journey in her chair. There was not much peace in the slow procession over the hills. Her eyes burned from weariness, her mind scanned discontentedly every word she had spoken in the three crises of the past twenty-four hours, yet suggested no better words in their place.

Almost to her surprise, her father looked better and stronger than he had seemed for months. He greeted his returned children with his old hearty affection. Nancy had feared to find him again in bondage to Kuei-lien; if she had found the fogs of that evil spell clouding the household, the daughter might well have turned her chair round, given up the fight for her father, gone back to Ronald.

But the great joy of her father in welcoming his children made Nancy ashamed of these treacherous thoughts. She read in his face his own sacrifice, the self-control which had kept him from forgetting his loneliness of a fortnight by exploiting his passion for the concubine. His restraint had been more than human. Only his love for his daughter, the wish not to mar her last days by any shadow of unhappiness, had held the man back from the delectable oblivion in Kuei-lien's beauty. He had spent many hours in his study, had written characters and read dry books and taken Li-an for long prattling walks, all the time wondering what Nancy was doing, hoping that she would not return, that she would yield to the persuasions he had foreseen, yet counting off one by one the days of her visit and dreading the one first act of disloyalty which might keep her with the friends and lover from the West.

When the chairs were announced he did not know which was uppermost, sorrow or joy, as he hastened to greet the wanderers. It was not his fault that Nancy had come back. The chance had been hers to escape. It was not his fault that they must fulfill the bond they had made. It was fate. One cannot fight against the ordinances of fate. He could only make the most of Nancy's last days at home.

But Kuei-lien and Li-an saved the return from being desolate. They were so full of questions that they awoke echoes of laughter in the household. They embarked Edward upon long tales and they set even the woebegone amah bragging till she forgot the dreariness of being back again in recounting the glories of the Ferris establishment, glories, she let her hearers distinctly understand, such as she had been bred to appreciate. When she descanted upon the cleanliness of the Ferris family, the unashamed use of soap and water, the delicacy which did not tolerate dust and cobwebs even in corners where they could not be seen, the splendor of the dinner table set with linen and silver and shining glasses, the manners and dress of the children, the bathrooms, the bedrooms, the kitchen, the pantry, it was only a step to her memories of Nancy's mother and of stories she got new zest, fresh energy, to tell for the hundredth time.

Nancy also lost part of her sadness in satisfying Kuei-lien's curiosity about everything that had happened during her stay—about everything except the things which mattered. She was clearer than her fulsome old nurse in describing the picnics and games and swimming parties and rebuilding before Kuei-lien's eyes every last detail of the costumes she had worn. Clothes intrigued the concubine; they were a harmless topic for Nancy to enlarge upon, indeed, kept her mind from graver regrets, so that Kuei-lien became quite enchanted by extraordinary surmises as to why the foreigner wasted good embroidery on her chemise and hid satin ribbons where they could not be seen, and cumbered herself, even at home, with the superfluity of a skirt.

As a practical demonstration, Nancy consented to wear a dress which Helen and Elizabeth between them had given her.

"It's our gift of remembrance," Helen had said.

"And who knows if the time won't come when you will want to give up being Chinese," added Elizabeth. "You will always have this ready."

Kuei-lien and Li-an led Nancy out, made her walk up and down the path behind the temple, while they clapped and laughed their applause at her unwonted appearance. So excited were they that they never heard Herrick approach, did not even guess his presence till he had stood for some minutes dumbly watching his daughter. When they saw him they turned suddenly quiet. Herrick gave a little helpless toss of his head, then he called Nancy to his room.

"Sit down," he said, looking wonderingly at this stranger of a daughter whom he felt—so curiously changed was she by her Western garments—he had never known before.

"I have been wondering," he began rather deliberately, "why you asked to be married earlier. The more I think of it, the less I understand it. What were you hiding from me?"

Nancy groped vainly for the faintest suggestion of an answer, but she could find no word to say. She sat mutely and helplessly on the edge of her uncomfortable chair.

"Were you hiding anything from me?" the man pursued.

"I don't know how to tell my reasons," said Nancy finally.

"Ah, Nancy, you are a mystery to me. I don't understand a tenth of you. I feel as though I had lost you. Did you want to be married?"

The question was like an appeal for reassurance on the part of her father, as if he wanted some support from the girl to resist his own doubts. Nancy did her gallant best to comfort him.

"Yes," she replied.

"I wish I could believe you," he sighed, only half convinced.

The ten days with his children away, his unexpected fortitude in denying to his nerves Kuei-lien's lethal comfort, had been a sacrifice he would have been wiser never to have made. There had been too much time to think. And Herrick had reached the state of body where thought was a uselessly distracting exertion. So long as his will shirked the strain of mending what was not past cure, Nancy's marriage, which had seemed such a reasonable match when it was four safe years away, had become a sinister dream he could not thrust from him. The sight of Nancy in her Western clothes made the pain unbearable. He tried to convince himself that he was not offering her up on the altar of his folly.

"Do you really want to be married?" he asked next, not content with her previous answer. "Do you understand what it means? You are so young. Time goes so fast."

"And if I don't want to be married," asked the girl, with a look of curious insight into the hesitations of his heart, "if I don't want to be married, will it make any difference?"

This was the very question Herrick wished she had not put. It required such a definite answer. To say "yes," to say that the marriage could be prevented at this eleventh hour, meant an act Herrick did not have the courage to perform so abruptly. The issue would be nothing less than throwing over the past thirteen years of his life. After so grave a breach of custom as the deliberate insult to the t'ai-t'ai's family in stopping a marriage on the verge of consummation, Chinese life would be impossible to him. The memory of Nancy's perjured troth would haunt the rest of his days. His only recourse would be to return to the West he had disowned. For his own sake, Herrick dreaded the thought; for Nancy's sake, Herrick groped for the strength of will to make the detestable change. But Nancy gave him no help. She did not weep, she did not shake his heart with sobs for pity, she did not stimulate the sapped vigor of his courage. At the moment when his heart cried to his daughter, by the sight of her uncontrolled weakness, by terror, misery, any violent agony of passion, to make him be brave, she would only put this candid question, which had to be answered so definitely by yes or no.

"I'm afraid it can't make any difference," he admitted after a fearful pause, "things have gone so far."

"Because I don't really wish to be married at all," said Nancy perversely.

Her father's raising a question which he himself now confessed was not the least likely to have any practical bearing upon her fate stirred up a sudden gust of anger, till she was unready to leave him the comfort of thinking she was happy. But Herrick, far from accusing himself of any fault, saw merely a freshly irritating symptom of the waywardness which had vexed him several times in the past.

"Why must you say that now?" he demanded. "How can I ever satisfy you when you ask for a thing at one time and then, when it is too late, tell me you don't want it?"

"It doesn't make any difference, anyway," said Nancy. "I was just answering your question."

"It does make a difference, a tremendous difference," the father cried. "Do you want me to throw over this engagement, to tell the t'ai-t'ai you won't marry her nephew, to bring everlasting disgrace on our heads?"

"No, we can't do that," replied Nancy, not permitting herself time to toy with the notion.

"It would mean the end of our life in China," added Herrick.

"Yes, it would."

"And taking you and Edward home to England. Would you like that?"

"I don't want to go to England. I want to stay here."

"So you see how impossible it would be to change."

"Quite impossible," Nancy agreed.

Herrick looked at the girl narrowly. He wondered if she were mocking him.

"What did the Ferrises think of your marriage?" he asked with a disconcerting shift in the direction of his words. "They didn't like it, I suppose?"

"Yes, they didn't like it."

"Did they want you to be a foreigner? Did they ask you to stay with them?"

"Yes."

"Did they tell you that your father was a fool, that he was ruining your life by his selfish schemes?"

"No," said Nancy, her loyalty shocked by the question.

"Then they were not as good friends as I had hoped they might be," said the father bitterly. "Ah, never mind me," he continued, ashamed of the puzzled dismay he had brought to Nancy's eyes. "I am saying stupid things. I can't help it when I don't feel well. Your marriage will be quite all right, my child. Of course you don't want to be married. What maiden does? But it's nothing to worry about. It's not like going among foreigners and having to learn new ways. The Ferrises have seen you only as a foreigner, just as you are now, and a pretty English girl you do make, Nancy; even I have to admit that."

Suddenly the picture of his daughter in Western clothes overpowered him; the mere mention of her appearance opened the floodgates of his despair, released a torrent of memories which rose higher and higher in his brain till they threatened to drown out his life with their unprisonable anguish. Herrick stood up like a man in great wrath; the veins of his forehead were swollen, his eyes ablaze with the violence of this unexpected temper.

"Go away, Nancy," he ordered, "go and change those wretched things! You have bewitched me with this masquerade. How can I decide anything, give my right mind to anything, when you sit mocking Me with the very clothes you wear?"

By a gesture he seemed to sweep the frightened girl out of his sight.

Only slowly, in the quiet of his room, did his muscles relax and his heart cease pounding. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. His hand was shaking.

"Why must I do these things?" he sighed. "It was not her fault."

His harshness had filled the house with silence. He rang his bell and to his surprise Kuei-lien appeared.

"Is there anyone alive in this cursed place?" he asked. "Can't you sing or shout or do something to make a noise? Where have Edward and Li-an gone? Have they lost their tongues?"

"You have frightened them all," said Kuei-lien, with an amused smile. "You shouldn't speak so crossly to your daughter. She is weeping. Her heart is not at peace."

"I don't need you to tell me that," Herrick retorted. Then his voice softened. "Where is she?" he asked.

"In her room, naturally," was the tart rejoinder of the concubine. "Did you think she was so happy that she would be out on the hills catching butterflies?"

"I will go and see her," said the father.

"Good, we'll all weep together."

Herrick paid no attention to this last impudence but strode across the courtyard to the room where his daughter was draining the bitterness of reaction which had overflowed her heart after the sore tests she had been forced to meet in such quick succession these last two days. Even in her bewilderment she had obeyed her father's wish and was dressed again in Chinese clothes. The discarded Western finery lay in a pathetic heap upon the floor.

"Nancy," said the father, putting his hand gently on her shoulder, "I am sorry. I did not mean to speak so angrily to you. I did not want to make you so unhappy."

Not for years had he said such words as these. Long ago he had lost the habit of making an apology. He had played the part of the all-sufficing tyrant who does not expect his acts to be questioned. But Nancy's distress, the sight of her wish to please him even by unreasonable obedience, struck deep beneath every artifice of manner, making him utter his words of contrition as genuinely as though he had not laid aside such language thirteen years back. At the sound of his voice Nancy pulled herself up and faced him with tear-stained eyes. She did not know how to answer her father's strange words.

"You are not to blame for making me angry," the father went on, carried beyond measure along the path of genuineness by the sorrow Nancy's face revealed, "it was my fault. I could not bear that glimpse of you in the Western dress you ought to have been wearing all your life. It reminded me too unspeakably of how I have cheated you. It made me realize how I have robbed your mother's daughter, Nancy, merely to follow selfish dreams of my own. All these years, my child—they have been a mistake, and I can never make them up to you."

The girl was still speechless, her grief forgotten in this immense unveiling of her father's heart.

"But I can stop one thing," he vowed, "I can make up one mistake, I can stop the folly of this marriage. You are young and I am old. You have your whole life before you. I have—nothing. It doesn't matter what becomes of me. I am going back to Peking to-morrow to tell the t'ai-t'ai that I am done with these schemes—my heart was never in them—I am not going to sacrifice my only daughter—for you are the only daughter I have been able to care about—I am not going to sacrifice my only daughter just to pile up the ruins of my own wasted life. After that—well, it doesn't matter what comes after that. I suppose I can dodder along in a frock coat and a silk hat till you find the one man who will love you better and care for you. Then one old man less in the world won't matter."

Nancy's quick sympathy rushed to raise her father from this unseemly abasement, to prove to him that he had not sacrificed her, that he had not done wrong, not made ruin of his life or of hers. How would he survive, she wondered, when all that he had delighted in was swept away? How could she ask him, at his time of life, to make these new beginnings for her? The blind love which had been too strong for Ronald's arguments, for the indignant persuasiveness of the twins, would not let her give way even before the appeal of her father himself; for she felt that he was pleading against himself. She had never known him outside the comforts of his Chinese home, the graceful amenities in which her own pride helped her to compass his. To make him an exile from these, from the spacious mode of living which she thought of as the very marrow of his bones, the tissue of his flesh, that was a fate she was not willing, cost what it might, to bring upon him. Her own dread of the West and its alien customs made her shrink still more sensitively from dragging her father out of the peace of a home which ought to be the shelter of his failing years.

"I would be unhappy all my life, if you did this," she said. "What right have I to hear my father saying such things? How can we break the promise we have made and not be ashamed forever after? No matter where you took me, my heart would not be at peace, for I should remember that my willfulness had destroyed my father's good name. 'Shall I follow the desires of my ears and eyes and bring my parents to disgrace?' Please don't remember my foolish words," she begged. "I don't want to go to the West among strangers. What do I know about foreign customs? My father gives too much weight to my mischievous idle words. I was only wearing foreign clothes to amuse Kuei-lien and Li-an. I will never wear them again. I did not mean to trouble my father or to make him think I was unhappy."

"Are you telling me the truth?" demanded Herrick, already alarmed by the largeness of the renunciation he had proposed.

"I am telling the truth," replied Nancy, with her eyes cast down.

"But you just said you didn't really want to be married."

There was a flush in her cheeks, a faint smile on her lips.

"What maiden ever really wanted to be married?" she asked. "If you offered me all the men in the world I should say the same thing." There was a pause. "I say many, many things," she went on softly, "and sometimes my words fight against each other. You have made me so happy, you have given me so many good things, that I could not but be sad to go out from the home of my father, even if I were called to the halls of the palace itself. But ah, my father, you know that your will is mine. The tree cannot be torn up to give light to the sapling. I am not so ignorant, not so self-willed, as not to know that 'to look upon obedience as right is the law for women.' I learned that long ago. In a thousand ten thousand of years I won't forget it."

Herrick was strangely moved by this grave eloquence from the lips of his child.

"You are wiser than you ought to be," he murmured; "there is not a man on this earth fit to marry you. I don't know whether I am brave or a coward in letting you go. You will miss me, Nancy, but oh, how I shall miss you! Sometimes I wish you weren't flesh and blood, but were like the rustling of the autumn leaves in the locust trees; then I could always have you and no one would envy me."

"The locust trees lose their leaves," said the girl quietly; the poem recurred again like a persistent undercurrent to her thoughts:—

"In a morning the spring is finished, the crimson colors are old—"

"Yes, they do," admitted Herrick; "we are foolish to take our little plans so seriously. It would be better if we were enjoying to-day instead of weeping over to-morrow. I have been weak, fickle, changeable, Nancy, and I have tried to blame you, tried to put the burden upon you. Here I have even been so irresolute as to hand over my will for you to direct. That was a thing no father should ask of his daughter. After all, what does it matter how much trust we put into our paltry schemes, what is the use of vexing ourselves, when the stars, whether we like it or not, decide our lives for us? You were right: autumn leaves do fall. I shan't remember you in them. I shall remember you in the stars, which give you your heart's quietness because you obey them. They don't change and grow old, they and the sun and the moon—"

"And the sun and the moon," echoed Nancy.

Then the world went black before her eyes.

CHAPTER XXVI

The seventh moon waxed and waned in a succession of trivial days. The interest of the summer, so far as Nancy was concerned, had ended with her triple battle waged against Ronald and the twins and her father. Chatter with Kuei-lien, perfunctory excursions with a wary eye lest she blunder into Ronald, whom she did not trust herself to meet again, filled in the tale of days. There was but one high moment, the Feast of Souls, when she and Edward secretly sacrificed to the spirit-tablet of their mother. Theirs was a fervid little cult which had grown up unmentioned except between themselves, a worship of the alien mother whom only Nancy dimly remembered. It signalized the bond which had always kept them from feeling quite kin to the rest of their father's family, an aloofness of origin which centred naturally round the legend of their mother.

Guided by reticence quite unusual to the communal life of the household, they had never been willing to drag their secret into the open gossip of the courtyards, but kept up this worship as an act and a habit too sacred to be divulged, too far apart from the noisy ostentation of the sacrifices which the women from time to time offered. Their shrine was holy ground, and when they made their sober childish prayers before the gilded tablet, the boy and girl, so shyly, fondly devoted to each other, seemed orphans indeed, shut out from the world around them by their still tenser devotion to the mother who was little more than a memory and a shadow.

Their worship this year was also, on Nancy's part, a farewell. She was saying good-bye to the spirit of her mother, whom she would not be entitled to worship next summer when the festival of All Souls once more quickened love and regret for the dead. For she must give up her own forefathers, give up even her mother, when she went out from home to the strange halls of her husband. Thenceforth his ancestors would be hers, and in place of the dearly loved tablet which she and Edward had fashioned so loyally between themselves, she must bow her head before a row of cold names which were not even dead to her because they never had been alive.

With grave seriousness she bequeathed the trust to Edward, envying him his right to worship his mother undisturbed until the end of his days. So passed the Feast of Souls, and one by one the days of the ghostly seventh moon slipped away.

Tedious, Nancy found them, for she was very much alone. She dodged close talk with her father, an attitude for which he was grateful, because neither he nor his daughter wished to touch again upon matters which in an incomplete, unspoken way they had left settled. The father stayed drowsily with his books, slept and dozed through the afternoons, realizing with taciturn dismay the fact that he was old and that his thoughts were empty of comfort. He tried some walking, but his heart complained. Undue exercise taxed his strength, sent the blood to his head. One thing he had set his will not to do: to give way to Kuei-lien's enchantment—not till his daughter was married. This was a promise he had made silently with himself, a little way of being fair to Nancy, and he stuck heroically to his agreement, although there were moments when the vacancy of the books over which he nodded made this ascetic life almost too tiresome to be borne.

"I don't understand you, Nancy," Kuei-lien said more than once, enjoying the comfortable sleepiness of the afternoons in Nancy's room. Her fear of the t'ai-t'ai had been growing less and her sympathy with the betrothed girl more. "I am not so blind as you think I am. This marriage is your making; I can see that, but I can't see why."

"One has to be married," was Nancy's usual defense, when the subject was forced upon her mind.

"Yes, but why this particular marriage, when your father has given you so many opportunities to get out of it? You are not one of us, Nancy, even though you believe you are. Your father would have liked it best if you had stayed with your foreign friends."

Kuei-lien, from her talks with the amah, knew more than the girl dreamed of the pressure the Ferrises had brought to keep their guest. In idle moments she could not help toying with the last year's plan.

"That is finished," said Nancy decidedly.

"If I had been your father's daughter," laughed the concubine, "I should have managed things much better. Your father would give every cent he has promised the t'ai-t'ai to be rid of this match. Why don't you fall sick or cut off your hair so that you have to become a nun? Then you would save everybody's face. Even the t'ai-t'ai would be satisfied, if she got her money—"

"She will get her money, whatever it is, in the way we have promised," announced the girl.

"I believe you are holding the old woman to her bargain just to spite her," vowed Kuei-lien. "You know her whole family is afraid of the daughter-in-law they are getting. If it weren't that they had been bribed by your dowry, they would just as soon marry their priceless son to a fox-spirit. They will think it a miracle if you don't bear him four-legged sons; it will be a miracle with such a donkey for their father! What are you going to do when you go to them? Are you going to play handmaid to your father-in-law's water pipe and sew out your eyes on underwear that is greasy from your mother-in-law's unwashed body?"

Against her own conscience Nancy was amused by the racy way Kuei-lien dealt with topics that were held to be sacred. She knew quite well that the parents of her husband were not proper game for these irreverent shots, yet she relished every impudent hit at their expense. It was one way of settling scores for the travail these unknown personages had given her. She was in a mood, as Kuei-lien perceived, to be spiteful. And she was curious to get every chance inkling of what her life was to be.

"And when you meet them in the morning, will you invite their 'jade toes graciously to approach'? If you do, Nancy, if you jump to fill the teapot and wait up late to put your old grandmother to bed, you will be lost, you will be their slave for the rest of your days. I know these small-livered people. They will live to a hundred just for the pleasure of bullying you, just to let you dust out every wrinkle of their sagging faces. If you have a daughter, it will be your fault because she isn't a son; if you have a son, it will be your meanness of heart that kept him from being twins. Faugh! the stupidity of having babies so that other people can cackle as if they were the hen that dropped the egg! I don't hold with these old-fashioned notions. I am a new Chinese, newer than you with all your foreign blood. And heaven help you if you have a white-haired brat!"

She said these unspeakable things so wickedly that Nancy could not keep from laughing. The betrothed girl watched the scornful twist of the lips by which the concubine expressed more aptly even than by words her pouting contempt for the Chous and all their clan. Kuei-lien's odd turns of sarcasm were pleasant to hear. The warm afternoon imparted its sense of lazy security even from the family to which she was promised. Nancy gazed with easy pleasure at her own white knees as she sat, half clothed, on the bed. She clasped her arms tightly round them and rubbed the soft skin with her cheeks, feeling almost as lazily content with summer and sunlight as she used to be in her more careless child days.

"What did Mencius say?" demanded Kuei-lien, continuing her tirade. "'At the marriage of a young woman, her mother admonishes her, accompanying her to the door on her leaving, and cautioning her with these words: You're going to your home. You must be respectful; you must be careful; do not disobey your husband.' Hm-m, I suppose your worthy old teacher put circles next to those characters, didn't he? He would. And what did the father say to his son? He 'admonished' him. That was all. The Sage didn't explain that part of it. The Sage was a man. I don't believe in sages."

Nothing was sacred to Kuei-lien in her mocking moods. She had never let Herrick be sacred even to himself.

"I don't believe in sages. I don't believe in nuns. I don't believe in priests. I don't believe in gods. And I don't believe in being respectful to a husband. You haven't a mother, Nancy; I'll be your mother. I will admonish you, I will accompany you to the door when you leave, I will caution you. Yes, indeed, you are going to your home. Very well, let them know from the first that it is your home and that you are not grateful merely for a place near the k'ang, like the chickens that peck rice off the floor. Remember, you will have the family purse in your hands, but only because they'll want you to produce twice the money that's in it, find cash for your father-in-law's opium and your mother-in-law's mah-jongg debts, and board and lodging for their third and fourth and fifth cousins and for all the children they can squeeze without cost under your roof. Stop that from the beginning; be as niggardly as they would be in your place. They will hate you, anyway, because you're a foreigner and because you're different and because they'll think if only they could have been bribed into taking your money without your precious self they might have secured a Yang kuei-fei in your stead. So you might as well give them good reason for hating you and, better still, for fearing you. Then, when you've scolded them till their ears are like wax and made them shake in their slippers every time they see your shadow crossing the courtyard, they will be only too happy to let you go back to your father, to the moon if you wish; they will press upon you the need for a long vacation and, while you're safely out of the way, they will find another wife, a nice quiet-tempered girl, for your husband, who can bear a dozen children and choke the house with the dust from her broom and pick bugs with nimble finger nails from the seams of the quilt in which your illustrious parents-in-law have been pleased to sleep for four thousand sweaty nights."

Nancy held up her hands in protest, but Kuei-lien laughed at her qualms.

"You can do it so easily," she said; "they will expect nothing better from you because you are a foreigner. Anything you do will be only what they expected. If only you browbeat them from the beginning, before they have got breath enough to browbeat you, then you will have your own way. You can go back to your father's and stay for sixty years and they will not be sorry; they will bless the spirits of their ancestors for having delivered them after their own folly in bringing a devil and a termagant into their midst. Aren't my words true? You will be happy, they will be happy, your father will be happy; everyone will be happy except the unlucky girl who takes your place. You can trust them to take revenge on her for all the injuries they have suffered from you. I don't envy her the time she'll have of it. But that's not your fault. Better somebody else miserable than poor me: that's the way to look at the foolishness of this world."

Many letters had been coming from the t'ai-t'ai, urging her husband to bring Nancy back to Peking. There were so many things to be done: the bridal furniture had to be sent, the wedding dress cut, the gifts procured. But Herrick refused to budge till the time he had set. With the coming of the eighth moon he could no longer postpone the claims of his wife. He roused himself unwillingly from this torpor of indecision and packed his reluctant family back to Peking. He had waited upon fate as long as he could, but fate offered him no help.

With their arrival in Peking, the t'ai-t'ai took vigorous command of the household. The momentum of her energy carried everyone before her, most of all Nancy, who had no further time to hesitate and reflect. The ensuing days became almost a round of processions, for Herrick had allowed barely time enough for the festivities which had to be crowded into twenty-four days. The courtyards never seemed clear of the smoke of firecrackers, the neighbors were always being called to their doors by the lilt of wind instruments. First came the wedding cakes, and the satin for the bridal dress, and elaborate gifts, which the t'ai-t'ai took care to return more elaborately.

It had been necessary to transport her brother and the important members of his family to Peking, to take for them a house in the capital, since Herrick had stood out obstinately against sending his daughter to be married in the ancestral home of the bridegroom. The t'ai-t'ai grumbled, of course; she grudged the expense which she said her brother could not afford, she moaned about the insult to her old mother who was much too feeble to make the long journey to Peking to see her grandson married. But Herrick said never to mind the expense; he would see that they were not out of purse because of this accommodation. With so liberal a promise, the t'ai-t'ai decided she could meet his wishes and she took care not only that Herrick should pay for moving Nancy's husband to Peking but that many of the showy presents, which were paraded through the streets on their way to the home of the bride, were actually gifts from Herrick to himself. Her thrift preserved Nancy's dowry intact from all the corroding expense of the wedding.

The autumn festival dawned, but its rejoicings were only an incident, compared with the greater day hurrying upon its heels. Nancy said quiet farewell to the full moon, climbing once again into her comfortable old pine tree to watch its splendor as the moon mounted. She turned a grave face to its light; it was not only a symbol of her sex, of her womanliness, the symbol which she had learned to revere from childhood, but it was bound by deeper ties to the inmost thoughts of her heart, so deeply bound that she almost looked for a miracle to be done in her behalf and this crowning moon of her life never to wane from its completed beauty. But it waned.

The rest was a dull trance in which the days went by, scarcely counted. Night after night the moon decreased; the girl's spirits fell. She kept tryst each evening with its rising until it rose too late to be awaited. Then the darkness frightened her.

In fear she gave herself up to the will of her stepmother and submitted without words to being taught the ceremonies of her wedding, to being set up like a doll for the fitting of the bridal garments. Despite Kuei-lien's laughing advice, she remained remote and aloof, the seething bustle of the household eddying unheeded round her body, which was the only part that her eyes gave them the feeling they could claim. Where her thoughts were no one could tell, no one indeed had the curiosity to search out except Kuei-lien, whose spirit of irony was amused by the puzzle of the silent girl.

The bridal furniture had been got ready. Three days before the wedding it was sent off.

Great show was made of the chairs and tables for the bridal chamber, the chairs with their carved arms and round panels of gray Yunnan marble, but, most sumptuous of all, the bridal bed, hung so heavily with curtains of scarlet satin that the wealth of embroidery led the eyes astray from the pictures inlaid in the woodwork and even from the silver chains which drew the curtains aside. Kuei-lien's tongue was rife with jests about this bed and its heap of satin quilts. Nancy hid her burning cheeks for shame at the concubine's unsparing frankness.

"Pooh, that's nothing to be afraid of," declared Kuei-lien. "You can be mistress there, even if you are the bride. Your husband will be more frightened than you to be shut up with a strange woman, and a foreigner at that, behind those happy curtains. They will fill him full of wine to make him brave. He's only a boy, nothing to shrink from or blush about. Marriage is marriage and a bridal bed is a bridal bed; it is foolish pretending to be so delicate about things that have to be. You are lucky to have rich curtains and plenty of warm quilts and one place where your mother-in-law can't trouble you. You don't have to make your bed your profession like me."