Sun and moon
Date: 2024-04-03T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Families -- Fiction; British -- China -- Fiction

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Title: Sun and moon

Author: Vincent H. Gowen

Release date: April 3, 2024 [eBook #73324]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Grosset & Dunlap

Credits: Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUN AND MOON ***

SUN AND MOON

by

VINCENT H. GOWEN

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1927

Copyright, 1927,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

All rights reserved

Published May, 1927

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS PUBLICATIONS
ARE PUBLISHED BY
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To the T'u-Lung Shan Mess

and in memory of A. S. B. and a group

that never can be gathered again

SUN AND MOON

CHAPTER I

The clear sun of July shone through the garden foliage, making circles of light on the grass wherever the inter-woven branches of the locusts allowed its passage. Summer rains had washed the air of all dustiness, swept the flags of the courtyards neat and clean, given new life to the climbing trumpet flowers and a mossy springiness to the path round the overflowing pool, into the waters of which the strong confident sunbeams seemed to plunge deeper than they had ever before dared dive, and to stay, joyfully exploring the green underdepths which matched the opulent color of the garden. For the garden too promised joyful exploring. One had to pass through courtyard after courtyard, through many large-timbered doors swinging on wooden axles and through each hallway of the Chinese house, sprawled out in section upon section, before entering this remote spot where the walls of gray tile shut out the city so completely and gave the impression of such space hidden in what really was quite small compass.

Here, like a hundred other wealthy families in their own unseen gardens, the household were able to enjoy rest from the urgent life of Peking yet never stray beyond the gates of the Tatar city. There was a sheltered pavilion in which to sip hot tea, a zigzag bridge of wood crossing the pool at its narrowest, shady nooks to suit the lazy reflective moods of the angler, best of all—if there were children—a labyrinth of stones, all heaped into grotesque mountains, through which the child, his imagination nimbly excited, could follow the circuitous path, absorbing the landscape of miniature lakes and tiny waterfalls and diminutive pagodas, and descend into the darkness of dripping grottoes as if he were the hero of them all.

Children there were; from behind a round moon gate came the clamor of their voices. But one stopped, astonished at the sight, for they were not the sedate children, the long-gowned boys and gracefully clad girls, one expected in so meditative a garden. They were not the offspring of Ming scrolls, as they should have been, transferred into life itself from the leisurely brush-strokes of old paintings, but strange barbarians, violent in their play, electric in the energy with which they defied the sun and its heat.

The moon gate opened on a place apart, a place of shrubs and formal pathways, but with two large pine trees, gnarled and misshapen as though they had outgrown human efforts to distort their branches, and with bamboo brake on all sides springing up in untidy profusion, yet with the mystery of its deep shadows making the walls seem more distant than they were.

In one of the middle branches of a pine tree sat a girl, swinging her feet mischievously as she dropped cones on the boy who lay at full length on the ground below. Whether he was trying to read or to write or even to sleep was not quite apparent, for, though he lay amid a litter of books and paper, with a stick of ink precariously balanced on the edge of an ink-stone and an unsheathed brush close to his elbow, his one endeavor was to defend himself with as little motion as possible from the bombardment above. This he did chiefly by agile wriggling, seeming to anticipate the course of each projectile by some sixth sense that spared him the trouble of looking up and, when a well-aimed cone struck his neck or his feet, strengthening his defense by racy Chinese abuse.

Yet it was not the sportiveness of the children which was so astonishing as their scantily free clothing and the fact, at once remarkable, that they were not Chinese children at all. The girl was easily fourteen or fifteen, but she swung on her bough with the unabashed grace of a tomboy. Her few garments suggested a creature that had grown up wild and untrammeled, for they were quite out of keeping with the delicate restraint of the garden or with the decorous attire the Chinese prescribe for their women. She wore only a loose gauze vest and a pair of white drawers fastened at her waist by a scarf of red silk. Her slippers had been flung off at the foot of the tree. Except for the heavy braid of hair tossed over her shoulders and the rounded curve of her breasts this strange maid might have been mistaken in her straight coolness for a boy in disarray. But the abiding memory of her, after even a moment's glimpse, was that she was not Chinese; the abiding memory was of arms and legs too white for the Chinese skin, even for the creamy ivory hue of the aristocrat, of a body longer, more fully built, feet more amply turned, of cheeks livelier flushed than the face of the ruddiest Chinese maiden, for the blood was not softened by that darker tinge of the complexion which makes one think of youth's picture painted on old silk. It was a miracle that under so ardent a sun the girl should have kept this spring-like clarity of skin. Unless in the deep color of her hair and her eyes she seemed to make no concession to the tropical warmth of July but to belong to forests where cold streams from the mountains pass amid trees.

Her brother was equally foreign to the baked sandy plains of Peking. He was possibly thirteen, with dark hair and dark eyes like the girl on the branch above him and with the same inviolable fairness of skin. He had reduced the encumbrance of garb to its limits and lay contentedly naked except for cotton trousers which he had rolled half-way up his thighs. So intent was he in countering pine cones with wordy retorts that he let a whole column of ants explore his shoulders unresented till suddenly his patience broke; he leaped to his feet, as swift as any untamed animal, and scrambled up the tree to grapple with his tormentor. The girl was too quick even for him and escaped from limb to limb, taunting him with her bare feet for his impudence in hoping to seize her.

The boy broke into English, most alarming English, violent curses such as foreigners in China use to loose their wrath on servants who luckily cannot understand, mixed with phrases he could have learned only in books—he showed at once that he had not acquired the tongue from playmates of his own age but was speaking it from the need to say something portentously terrible, something which to his youthful consciousness would answer the purposes of blasphemy.

"You filthy devil, Nancy," he shouted, "I will strike you dead! I will cause you to fall!"

Nancy answered him by peals of laughter. She stood poised with tantalizing ease, her hands held up to the branch above her, and swayed back and forth without fear of her brother's threats. She exposed to derision the bookish mould of his words.

"Oh, you naughty boy, Edward, you will cause me to fall, will you?"

Before the boy could move out upon her precarious platform, she had let go her hold, doubled her knees, and shot from bough to bough down the tree like a white cascade or like snow shaken free from overladen branches.

Edward, seeing his enemy had escaped, was satisfied in his turn to pelt her with cones and was vigorously at battle when a third child, even younger, emerged from the bamboo and protested at the noise of their quarreling. This child, a girl, was decidedly different from the others. She had Chinese complexion, Chinese features; she was dressed in the hot-weather négligé which girls of her age could wear in the privacy of the home, long loose trousers, stockings, slippers, an apron, cut so that it covered the front of her body and held in place by strings round her back and her neck. When she came up to Nancy, however, and stood beside the taller girl, there was immediately apparent a resemblance between the two children, a resemblance baffling to decipher, for, even when allowance was made for four years' disparity in age, no one could say it consisted definitely in eyes or mouth or even in the slightly un-Chinese prominence of the nose, yet the resemblance was latently noticeable and was a likeness which included the boy as well. This second girl, then, gave some clue to the history of these strange children; she was certainly their half sister, and it took no great powers of deduction to surmise European parents for them, the same father and a Chinese mother for herself. Exactly this was the case.

Timothy Edward Oliver Herrick had been the subject of Peking scandal twelve years before. He had, to the shocked astonishment of his friends, "gone Chinese," which was another proof, to those who hated the drudgery of turning the pages of Giles's heavy dictionary, that too much study of Chinese makes men mad. He had come to China at the early age of twenty—that was thirty years back—and risen quickly from post to post in the Imperial Customs, passing his examinations brilliantly, learning much in all the ports of the Middle Kingdom, charming society out of its stiffness by his wit and tact, penetrating the aloofness of the mandarin, winning distinction in diplomacy and sport, orders, badges, medals, cups, a whole roomful of trophies, and marrying a girl fresh from her schooling in England, the daughter of a consul and undeniably the loveliest, in a decade, of those damsels who return to enjoy a brief season with exiled parents in the East. So for four years they had lived, favored by wealth, honor, love, the ingredients of a fairy tale, till on a sudden Nancy Herrick died,—cholera that year struck down even those in high places,—while her husband retired into a seclusion he never again broke.

In appalled whispers it was mooted through Peking that Timothy Herrick, with his two children, had taken house in an obscure hutung of the Tatar city and that the beautiful Nancy Herrick had been followed not by one Chinese wife only but by several.

Gossip, for once, was true to the facts, probably because society could think of no exaggeration more dreadful than the truth. At the back of twisting lanes, behind bright blue doors studded with brass, Timothy Herrick had created a new world of his own in the spacious security of a Chinese house and there with his wife and his concubines he lived the life of a mandarin. He had discarded Western clothes, Western ways, discarded his British nationality, taken to a moderate use of opium, and now passed his time between an erudite searching of the Buddhist scriptures and the composition of severely classical poems.

Yet this placid consolation for sorrow, this refinement of the patriarchal life which has stood the Chinese race so well for centuries, had one or two irritants. The first, seemingly small yet vexing, was Herrick's chagrin at his failure to grow a queue or, rather, at the futility of a brown queue in a land of black-haired people. He remembered the ridiculous figure of a missionary who had tried this, and knew that while his own florid face, with its heavy eyebrows and moustaches, bobbed up oddly from the collar of his lavender jacket, it would look none the less incongruous if his square forehead were shaved and the back of his head ornamented by a dwindling tail. The Revolution, however hateful its other changes, did at least solve this problem of how to be completely Chinese by making the queue unfashionable.

The second irritant was of another kind and quite another degree; it grew in seriousness with the passage of years and vexed the quiet of his sleep. It was the fate of Nancy and Edward, the two children of his first marriage. For his other children, he did not worry; there were several of them, from Li-an, a girl of eleven, down to an infant son still being bumped in his cradle, but they were all more Chinese than foreign and with the help of generous betrothal gifts could be assimilated by the country of their birth. Nancy and Edward were different. Although they never knowingly had seen, apart from their father, another member of their own race and in twelve years had left their compound only on the rarest occasion and then in a covered mule cart to visit the Western Hills, there was no disguising their foreign blood.

It had seemed easy, when they were babies, to mould them to their environment by education and custom and speech, but there was a stubbornness inherent in their nature which had resisted the Orient and kept the girl and the boy exotic. They had lost claim to any country and grown up disinherited by West and East alike. The father saw this more and more plainly and regretted his selfishness in keeping them when it would have been so easy to send them to his kinsfolk at home. At the time of his first wife's death he could not bear to part with them. They were the only relic of a woman he had loved so well that his whole after life had become a slow descent, because his heart told him the hopelessness of living again on the plane he had reached with her.

He had deliberately turned away from that life because it was ended, cut short, impossible of being renewed. He had chosen in preference a life which would ask no comparison with the past; the tale of his success was being revealed in the relaxing lines of his mouth, the sensual fullness of his chin, a hardening of the eyes. The more serenely burned the memory of his wife,—the years never changing the austerity of her beauty, something perfect like the imperishable beauty of jade,—the more contemptuous did he grow in his thoughts of women, as if to mark her apartness, and give rein to the amorous cruelty of a tyrant. One by one the children had seen the household increase as some new young girl was bought to satisfy the whims of their father, and one by one they had seen these favorites, after serving their time as mistress and mother, relegated to the women's quarters, which were daily becoming more expensive a luxury.

But Herrick remained uncomfortable amid it all. He could not be morally at ease while these two wide-eyed strangers from the West reminded him of his troublesome duty. They were holding him back from that complete immersion in the indolent life he had chosen. He could not swallow the opiate of peace. Their faces seemed to reproach him for neglect; they were uncomfortably knowing. He imagined them talking between themselves in the candid youthful way which appraises too exactly the faults of parents. Theirs had been a curious education because Herrick had made it plain from the first that they were not to be interfered with by the Chinese women of his household.

Trouble had begun after Li-an was born, the stepmother, with a child of her own to advance, having tried to cow these children of an alien mother by petty acts of jealousy, which it was fortunate for Nancy and Edward they had the championship of their old nurse to resist. This nurse had been with them all their lives, and, by fighting tooth and nail each effort to reduce their position, had won for them a freedom from the quarrels and intrigues of the family. As Li-an soon had other rivals to dispute her inheritance, her mother had trouble enough in wielding her sway over the rank of inferior wives and was content to let the foreign girl and boy go their way alone. So they were in the family but not of it, intimately subject to the direction of only one person, the old amah, who humored and spoiled them, telling them always that they were superior beings and secretly undoing their father's attempt to make them Chinese.

Herrick's desire was one the amah hotly resented. She had the peculiar loyalty of an old servant and, remembering Nancy's mother with an affection close to worship, looked with contempt on the women who had followed. They were trash. She was not going to let Herrick's aberrations of passion ruin the hopes of her foster children. With the servile fidelity of a dog she had attached herself to creatures of an alien race, had wrapped her interests in theirs, till her one wish was to see Miss Nancy and Master Edward restored to their own people, where their station, she was sure, would be almost royal. So she fed them with marvelous tales of the West; of its greatness; tales of their own importance. She waited on their moods like a slave and produced in them a bearing of haughty independence which they never quite laid aside, even when they mixed in play with their half brothers and half sisters or took their part chattily in the gossip of the inner courts.

Their formal education, for a long time, had been only in Chinese, the old classical education to which Herrick was partial. They had learned to recite the Four Books and much of the Five Classics and had passed through the obsolete training of Chinese youth, from the redundant exercises laid like a yoke upon children—the Tri-metrical Classic, the Thousand Character Classic—to the pleasanter fields of T'ang poetry, which their teacher explained to them with unusual interest and skill, so that Nancy and Edward often amused themselves patterning upon the hero and heroines of the Red Balcony in contests for writing verse of their own. They wrote well. They spent hours over characters and could fill a scroll with swift symmetrical strokes. They could draw and paint landscapes which they had never seen, landscapes of mountain and valley, temple and trees, delicately colored after the unwavering tradition of the past. This, except for the few novels their teacher approved, The Three Kingdoms, The Dream of the Red Balcony, and Travels in the West, and the many which he did not approve, novels they begged secretly from the women of the household and which related with utmost frankness every physical detail of intercourse between the sexes,—though the talk they had listened to all their lives left them little need to be enlightened further,—this promised to be the whole of their education till their father began, in a hesitating way, to teach them English.

Timothy Herrick had not intended such instruction. It marked the first timid thought of surrender, a breach in the logic of their training. But Nancy at ten so disquieted him that he could not rest till he had made some amends for depriving her these many years of the birthright of her native speech. If his plans did fail,—he would not admit that they could,—if she and her brother did resist their absorption into Chinese life, he could give them this means of saving themselves. It was the least he could do, but it meant the possibility of sending them to England, should the need come, where among the uncles and cousins and aunts, to whom he had written not a word in a decade, there were certainly some who could take his children in charge.

He taught them, however, with discretion, always reminding them that English was a foreign tongue. So Nancy and Edward, though they learned to speak with a considerable if bookish fluency, looked upon English very much as an English schoolboy looks upon Latin, as a speech dealing with far-off times and manners. They liked to use it between themselves from the sheer mischievous pleasure of mystifying the other children of the compound; there was the spiteful relish of abusing to their faces people who were not a word the wiser. Then again it was a bond with their father, of whom they grew measurably fonder now that he and they constituted a little aristocracy to which no others had access. Herrick himself soon realized this and liked it less; it was another subtle influence helping to tear him asunder. But when once the habit of daily lessons was formed he could not give up the grave companionship of these two children, who, fight the thought as he would, came closer to his heart than all the tumbling black-haired brats of the compound.

Yet the first thoughts of the girl and the boy were always Chinese. Their background was the Confucian background of their long-nailed teacher, though there were side paths of course into Buddhist and Taoist lore, things they learned from the women or from the nuns who came to collect alms. Of Western history and life, of wars and political changes, they knew scarcely more than the Chihli farmer ploughing his sandy fields or the Mongolian camel-driver leading his tinkling caravan on the night road to Peking. What they heard, except from the few colorless English books they were allowed, was the chatter and gossip of the courts. Newspapers did not come into the women's quarters; these were kept in that sombre room, their father's study, where they dared go only when invited. So they felt themselves better than the Chinese they mingled with, but no kin to the prodigious people of the West.

This was both more and less than Timothy Herrick had planned.

CHAPTER II

The bell rang for tiffin. The servants were very punctilious about this bell. The custom of ringing it, imported by the amah for the seemly benefit of her two children, had become a family rite and the subject of much pride to the women, who boasted to the families round about that they were always called to meals by this stately summons. Such was Nancy's and Edward's deference to the custom that they rushed immediately to their rooms, Li-an only a step behind them, and had soon appeared, clad in trousers and jacket, to do honor, as their nurse had taught them, to the formality of the noonday meal.

Herrick of course did not eat with them. The condescension was not expected. But the size of his family was amply demonstrated by the women and children who had gathered round the square tables in the room which was referred to rather proudly as the dining-room, although dining was only one of its dozen functions. Nancy and Edward sat at one table with their half sister Li-an and her mother, the woman who as Herrick's wife held the right of first place in the household.

Hai t'ai-t'ai, as she was called, was not an old woman; she had been less than twenty when her father, Herrick's teacher for many years, a man harassed by a shoal of impecunious relations, saw profit to his family and the strengthening of a curious attachment in marrying his daughter to this wealthy Commissioner of Customs. But responsibilities had aged her appearance till she seemed nearer fifty than thirty,—responsibilities and much good eating,—so that she was now a stout matronly person with the wooden masklike face which goes with dignity. On her shoulders fell the management of the establishment, the settlement of the many disputes which were bound to arise where wives and maids and menservants and children of several breeds were so inextricably mixed.

On the whole, she was equal to her place. She maintained her rule with considerable strictness, controlled expenditure thriftily enough to lay aside means of her own, saw that Li-an, if she could not lord it over Nancy and Edward, could at least lord it over the inferior brothers and sisters that had followed. She would not have exchanged the privileges of power for the less substantial marks of favor which fell to the lot of the younger wives. From only one person could she claim no obedience; that was the nurse. But Hai t'ai-t'ai, in the happy old Chinese manner of compromise, tacitly recognized the care of the two white children as a matter outside her province, accepting them as though they were ambassadors with treaty rights in her kingdom.

Between the two other tables the four concubines and their families were divided. To the casual observer they seemed an amiable, good-tempered group, knit together into a queer democracy, democracy based upon a man's more volatile affections, yet there was not a person among them who did not have her own pretensions and rights, so that the family, if all secrets could be told, was the most carefully graded of principalities. Since all of them, like the t'ai-t'ai herself, had been chosen because they satisfied Herrick's fastidious notions of beauty, all were young, all were vivacious and handsome. It was not fading of feature but cares of motherhood that had caused each in turn to be supplanted, although none of them could claim her master's love to the exclusion of the others.

As secondary wives, they lacked of course the rank of the t'ai-t'ai; they also lacked her gentility. But they were not deterred by the fact of inferior station from grumbling over her control and imagining ways of replacing her in the management of the family. The oldest of these concubines felt particularly aggrieved because she had borne her master two sons and by Chinese custom should have stepped definitely ahead of a wife who had borne but one miserable daughter. She felt her injury more deeply as the years passed; the delights of the table, from which she could not hold herself back, were visibly altering the daintiness of her figure and she deemed it only fair, only the natural course, that she should regain through her sons the influence her body was resigning.

Of the other three, two had been mothers once and had the prospect of soon being mothers again, while the last was a young slave girl of seventeen who had been exalted to the rank of mistress by the recent whim of her master. The two mothers were pretty, ordinary women, very much wrapped in their children and busier ramming chopsticks into those sticky mouths than in filling their own. They accepted the lead of the first concubine, aligning themselves with her complaints, but they were always properly docile in the presence of the t'ai-t'ai and, if left alone, would have found business enough in the care of their children.

But the newest concubine, the reigning favorite in Timothy Herrick's affections, was an animated contrast to the three who had preceded her. While they were handsome, she was brilliantly beautiful, an exquisite figure and face, with creamy skin, glowing eyes, lips which needed no scarlet paint to accentuate their color, heavy black hair that shone by an iridescence of its own to which the oil of elder bark could have added nothing. She was the only one of his wives with whom Herrick had become definitely infatuated. Such was his delight in her company that for days she did not appear at meals with the other women or enter their apartments, but shared the board as well as the bed of her master. In consequence she was so bitterly disliked that any of her three predecessors gladly would have thrust a knife into her breast or marred her body by slow torture.

It was a further cause for quarrel with the t'ai-t'ai that this wanton creature had been taken particularly under her protection. Indeed, she was accused of having brought about Kuei-lien's advancement. Most of the slave girls were coarse drudges, soon polluted by the sluttery of their living quarters. Kuei-lien not only had been bought at the instance of the t'ai-t'ai but made the subject of partial treatment, spared the harder tasks, given better clothes, and defended from the familiarity of the menservants. So there was reason to perceive more design than accident in Herrick's discovery of the girl and his command that she be divested of her humble attire, bathed, dressed in costly silks, and brought like a queen to his chamber.

The relationship of Nancy and Edward to the four mistresses of their father was most informal. They were not shocked by the function of these women because they had never been taught to be shocked. It was an ordinance of nature that a man should have as many wives as he could afford, a sign that all was well with the business investments from which Herrick drew his income. The boy and girl moved quite freely through the house and were on amiably chatty terms with its inhabitants. They played with the children, most of course with Li-an, who had been longer their playmate and was a fair partner in their quarrels and their peacemakings; they fell out now with one group, now with another, but most often with each other, so that no one grieved long over these usual bickerings of children. In the jealousies of the household they had not been involved. The women had treated them with advised caution, preferring not to complicate their intrigues by introducing a new and unstable ingredient. They did not understand the two foreign children, and so treated them with a careful friendliness such as committed themselves neither to enmity nor to love.

But Kuei-lien had disdained these wary tactics. She had set herself quite openly to win Nancy's affection and of course had met no reverse, since the charm which had won the father was easily adaptable to winning the daughter. Nancy even had asked the t'ai-t'ai to put Kuei-lien at the table with them, but this slight upon the others Hai t'ai-t'ai and the amah both agreed was not politic. Still there was nothing to prevent Kuei-lien's spending much time in Nancy's room, which the others never entered of their own accord, where talk, replete with zest and flavor, helped the intimacy to grow.

The championship of the amah had won her charges more seclusion than the others enjoyed. The house, like all Chinese houses, was of many sections, divided by courtyards, and, like the houses of the North, it was substantially built. Occupants and servants and even the dogs moved with no thought of privacy through its rooms and hallways, that is, through all except the portion allotted to Nancy and Edward. Now that the brother and sister had grown too old to live together, they had been given the choicest part of the house and the innermost, where they lived, virtually isolated, between the garden and the last of the courts, with the t'ai-t'ai and their amah for the only immediate neighbors.

They could have asked no place more charming. Their rooms were to left and right of the hallway; which was continued in a straight line through every section of the house so that if all the heavy middle doors had been opened the garden could have been seen from the street as at the end of a long tunnel. Their doors and windows faced the courtyard and this was a very pleasant place. Locust trees towered on either side; from their lowest branches hung cages in which canaries sang and starlings raucously mimicked human speech. Into the pavement two small pools had been built, where goldfish flashed their tails as they swam to and fro round islands of porous rock on which tiny houses and temples and bridges and figures of men and women, in fascinating diversity of posture, had been set to give lifelikeness to the mossy crags. There were flower beds too, multicolored in their profusion of zinnia and canna and marigold, while a vine with diminutive scarlet blossoms climbed the bamboo scaffolding, across which matting was rolled to break the glare of the sun.

Here Nancy and Edward enjoyed very comfortable quiet. Except when servants went through to wash clothes in the pond, they were seldom disturbed; the concubines preferred the liveliness of their own courtyard and rarely went walking in the garden till the afternoon sun had gone down. All day long, after the clothes had been beaten dry on flat stones and the thumping of wooden paddles had ceased, the children heard only the songs of their birds and the agreeably shrill noise of the cicada.

Since her preferment, however, the slave girl Kuei-lien had become a visitor to Nancy's room and at any hour of the day, when the children were not shouting their lessons from the adjacent schoolroom, might lift the screen of Nancy's door and enter. The afternoon was the time she liked best to come, when the shady coolness of Nancy's room was a refuge from the child-infested chambers of her own quarter.

It was a simple room but spacious, divided into two parts by a screen of carved wood in which was an octagonal opening, quaintly shaped, to allow passage from Nancy's bedchamber to what in effect was her parlor. The furniture was not sumptuous; the carpets had been removed at the beginning of summer and the stone floor covered with matting. There were the usual stiff-backed wooden chairs and one or two reclining ones of wicker, narrow tables on which stood gaudy vases, cheap and disagreeably shaped. The walls were decorated with Nancy's own efforts at painting. In the bedchamber were boxes of white pigskin where the girl stored her clothes. The bed itself was a large varnished affair inlaid with different woods. Four posts held up the muslin mosquito curtain. Nancy, never having known steel springs or horsehair mattresses, was quite content with the wicker network over which she had spread a thin cotton pad, leaving the heavier quilts and the mat, which was the coolest to sleep upon in sultry weather, rolled to one side of the bed.

It was here Kuei-lien usually found the girl lying, comfortably divested of the outer garments she donned only for meals and classes, her head raised upon a bamboo pillow and her hand slowly fanning the knees she had drawn up in front of her. Kuei-lien herself would slip off trousers and jacket and lie on the bed beside her or squat cross-legged on a large low stool and share with Nancy the cigarettes which helped their confidences. And Edward, if he were bored or too lazy to sleep, made a third and teased the girls with pleasant sedateness proper to a hot afternoon.

Their talk was sophisticated. Nancy was curious about the forbidden topic of marriage, eager to gain all the knowledge she could from the experience of her father's mistress. To Chinese girls of her age marriage loomed on the horizon, so that it was little wonder she exercised much ingenious fancy in pondering who her husband was to be.

"Oh, you will marry an Englishman," said Kuei-lien.

"But I have never seen an Englishman."

"Your father is an Englishman."

"Pooh, my father is too old!" Such was Nancy's respect for Kuei-lien's superior acquaintance with life that she never thought of the concubine as only two years older than herself, nor that what her words suggested in her own case must also be true in Kuei-lien's. And there was the further difference that a concubine is not a wife; for a man of fifty to take a concubine of seventeen was only reasonable; to take a wife of seventeen would have been extraordinary. Nancy could not have imagined a man living unmarried to the ripe age of fifty.

"My father is too old. What does a young Englishman look like? Have you ever seen one?"

"Of course, I've seen many," replied Kuei-lien, ignoring, if she was aware of it, Nancy's defect of tact. "There are many young Englishmen in Peking. They have yellow hair and red faces and big teeth and big moustaches like your father's—"

"The young ones?"

"Yes, the young ones. I think they are born with moustaches. They wear short coats, and look very hot, and always say 'goddam' to their friends."

The picture was too repulsive.

"I won't marry an Englishman," said Nancy.

"Then what will you marry?" put in Edward.

"I want to marry the Emperor," answered the girl in a sudden burst of fancy.

Because her auditors both laughed, Nancy obstinately defended the absurd notion.

"When the Emperor sends to choose a wife, I shall go to the palace, and then he will command me to be his Empress, and I shall make Edward a governor."

"But he can't do that any more. We have a republic now. And, besides, you are not a Manchu. You are not even Chinese; you are only English."

"That's all the better," said Nancy, "because if the Emperor has an English Empress then all the English will belong to him and he can use their guns to drive out these republican barbarians."

Nancy's extravagant words had soon been repeated through the household where they excited great merriment. The women giggled at her temerity and nicknamed the girl privately, calling her "Mock-Empress," a name of which Nancy did not become aware till by her haughty mood she provoked it from the lips of Li-an.

"You are nothing but a half-naked barbarian, you mock-empress," exclaimed the half sister in anger. "Do you expect me to knock my head on the ground to you?"

Then the hair flew. Nancy, her wrath swiftly wakened, pounced on the younger girl.

"Yes, you shall knock your head," she cried. With her strong arms she bent Li-an to the earth.

"Knock, knock, knock," she shouted as she thumped the head of her victim against the ground. "Now you will see if I am a mock-empress or not."

Edward intervened and Li-an fled screaming to her mother, in whom the attack awakened all the old jealousy of these children who carried themselves superior to her own daughter. The t'ai-t'ai went to see Herrick about the affair.

"Nancy is growing up and getting silly notions," she told him. "Why don't you send her back to her own people? A girl as big as she is should be engaged. No one here can control her."

Herrick listened in annoyance.

"What do you know about these things?" he asked testily. "Don't I know what is best for my own daughter? You take children's quarrels too seriously. English girls never marry so young. You look after the behavior of your own child and we shan't have these disturbances."

The t'ai-t'ai took the rebuke in silence. But she knew as certainly as though he had spoken the words that her English husband was only trying to conceal his perplexity.

She had touched upon a sore spot. If he had no plan to suggest she must think of one, lest two foreign children, like tiger cubs reared for pets, swallow their playmates of the nursery.

CHAPTER III

Herrick decreed a retreat to the Western Hills. Seldom though he emerged from his dwelling, the man could not escape the hubbub of a city which slept and prattled out of doors. The barking of mongrel dogs agitated him and made him restless at night. He wished a place where he could think his troublesome problem to an issue, so his fancy turned to the solitude of the hills. He would carry off Kuei-lien like a bride, take Nancy and Edward and the old nurse, and leave the rest of the family to babble away the summer in Peking.

The sister and brother heard the news with undisguised joy. They were more weary of Peking than their father, for they had no change from the enclosed monotony of the compound and were come to a restive age when their limbs craved movement. They wanted to walk and to run and to gaze upon far-away sights with no high walls preventing them.

They awaited with impatience the cool dawn when they could climb into the mule cart and sit in high glee with Kuei-lien squeezed tightly between them. The cart began jolting over the gritty surface of the streets, jarring their bones despite the padding of the floor and the cushions which were fastened to the framework. But this they were too excited to mind. They only regretted the gauze curtain which, by the strict orders of their father, had been flung across the front of their hooded compartment. Their father, however, could not hinder their pushing the curtain from side to side in their eagerness to observe to the fullest the fascinating life of the streets.

Even at this early hour the market and the shops were opening; trains of camels whose thick hair had fallen off in patches were coming down the long street from Hsichih-men; donkeys with bells jingling on their collars bore the weight of fat travelers; Manchu women, so noticeable because of their long gowns and enormous beetle headdress, were stirring abroad; a princeling from the court of the deposed Emperor rode past, followed by retainers; scarlet plumes of horsehair flashed from their conical hats. Nothing escaped the eyes of the children; even the humblest shopkeeper taking down the boards from his windows won their marked interest, and there was observant pleasure in seeing the pavilions on Coal Hill, the turquoise and orange roofs of which seemed to swim in the lucent mists of dawn.

The cart rumbled through a vaulted gate, skirted the precincts of a railway station where the screeching engine provoked an ecstasy of excitement in the hearts of brother and sister; then came slow progress along willow-bordered roads while the sun, growing hotter and hotter, beat down through the blue hood of the vehicle, making Kuei-lien sleepy, tired of her stiff, cramped position, anxious to stretch and to yawn. A stupa of many towers was left to the south; the sombre ruins of the old summer palace were passed and the splendid new palaces of the Empress Dowager, which meet the fragments of Ch'ien Lung's marvelous pleasure domes on the summit of Wan Shou Shan. The children appreciated them all and looked eagerly at the spire-like pagodas of the jade fountain and the dilapidated buildings which were used to house tigers and bears in the far-away time when Tatar princes followed the chase.

Afternoon had come before the cart came at last to the foothills. The children climbed stiffly to the ground. Nancy hoped she might mount a sturdy little donkey for the journey into the mountains, but her father would allow his family to ride only in covered chairs. Not without a pouting of lips did Nancy obey, but soon she lost her disappointment in the charm of scenes she had not laid eyes upon for two long years, not since before the disastrous days of the Revolution. For the first time she was enjoying the dignity of a chair to herself. Hitherto she had been huddled into the same narrow seat with Edward, but now she could look elegantly from side to side through the square windows, and see the plains recede behind the toiling feet of the chair coolies, and Peking, with its towering gates and golden roofs and graceful dagobas, filling the horizon far beyond the palaces of Wan Shou Shan. Suddenly the girl grew inordinately happy. She drank in the ozone of the pines and looked down the steep slopes of the gorge they were traversing till she felt as free as the water that tumbled blithely across the boulders.

At dusk much climbing brought the chairs to the secluded temple Herrick had converted into his summer home. Years ago it had been built on a small flat piece of ground almost overhanging the edge of a ravine. In the old days its red-washed walls might have been conspicuous, but trees had grown round it, a brake of hardy bamboo hidden its entrance till the very bricks themselves seemed to have taken root in their wild terrace. The square beacon tower which crowned the opposite ridge was so desolate and forsaken, so obviously part of a world long passed away, so remote from its time of flaming usefulness, that it served merely to accentuate the loneliness of the place. The men it told of were men who never again would buckle on armor and seize long spears at the news of attack. And the broken gods of the temple whom none worshiped told in their decay the same tragic story.

Nancy hurried with awe through their midst and came gladly to the courtyard she and Edward shared. Oil lamps gleaming through paper windows gave comforting assurance of a supper hot and ready. After all the changes of the day the girl had begun to feel qualms of homesickness for the noisy household in Peking; at sunset she had grown sad, and now she wanted to shut out the magical sound of the wind in the pines and the water pouring down the ravine, for she was a little afraid of the loneliness. She longed for play and laughter and the shrill disputes of concubines and servants. She was sorry Li-an had not come. She would have liked the agreeable relaxation of a quarrel.

The cheer of supper gave way all too soon to the able terrors of bedtime. Nancy lay awake for hours haunted by the absence of all vocal sound; she tried to write in imagination the most difficult chapters of the Four Books: "i p'o, i hun, san tien"—she counted off the strokes and shaded them gracefully in her mind or pulled them short with the neatest of hooklike twists, but all to no avail. The trees would not keep still; the maddening stream would not cease running.

At last, in the panic of one who is seldom sleepless, the girl got up. She was envious of Edward's sound slumbers and went cautiously to his room to awaken him. To her surprise the boy spoke before she had time to call him. He recognized her footsteps.

"I can't sleep," he complained in loud whispers; "let's go outside or do something. It's too quiet here."

Nancy told him in low tones to follow. There was a moon outside. The two children looked like ghosts as they moved with slippered feet across the rough marble pavement of the courtyard. The back door was unbolted and slightly ajar so that its creaking was barely audible as they slipped through. They were in a weed-tangled grove of young trees, but the few yards of path were easy to follow. Under the brow of the cliff which set definite limits to the foothold of the temple they saw the tomb of some forgotten abbot, a domelike structure with a ringed pinnacle. It was in deep shadow. They gave an exclamation of dismay and hurried to the side where the path led up a short flight of steps to the top of the wall and ended abruptly in a little rickety platform of wood that gave high views of the ravine.

Nancy's heart was ripe for mystical adventure. The night was cool but she felt no bodily chill through her thin garments. She was inordinately sad, uneasy, desirous of some change, some intrusion to match the hopeless beauty of the night. A waning moon, halfway done with its short flight from mountain to mountain, illuminated the stream far below and gave luminous surface to the rocks with its tranquil light, but left the shadowy parts a pitchy blackness which hid them like a veil. Wistfully Nancy surveyed the scene and looked at the crumbling watchtower on the ridge opposite. Her reading had made her curiously unmodern. Her thoughts dwelt on phantom armies of the past, of princes masterly at falconry losing their way in the wilderness, of old cries and alarms which she could not reconcile herself to believing had long since ceased. She ached to help these poor lost mortals of the past, to be their heroine, their desire. How could she tell such dreams to Edward, dear, stupid, faithful boy that he was?

"What can you see?" asked the brother, surprised at her intent gaze.

"Lots of things," was Nancy's cryptic answer.

"Well, that's more than I can see."

"Ah, but you haven't my eyes."

Another fifteen minutes of this purposeless staring, this obstinate silence, was all that Edward could bear.

"Are you going to stand there looking at nothing all night?" he demanded. "I'm getting sleepy and, besides, it's cold."

"Go in and sleep then," said Nancy.

"I'm—I'm afraid," said the boy, after a moment's pause. "I don't like that tomb. I don't like to go past it."

"Pooh! If that's all, I'll take you past it."

Nancy took his hand and walked bravely down the steps.

"Look, I'm not afraid," she said when they reached the grave, and she suited action to words by kicking the unoffending sepulchre with her slipper.

"Stop!" cried Edward, pulling her back. "Aren't you coming with me?"

"No, of course not."

"You're not?" he echoed in amazement.

Nancy had a delicious feeling of terror in her own foolhardiness.

"I'm not ready to come yet."

Edward stopped for an instant, wondering if he ought not to stay; then he turned and fled while Nancy, who gladly would have followed him, tried to walk unconcernedly, as though her heart were not pounding with fear, back to the platform on the wall.

The moon had slipped out of view, letting the stars, now unrivaled, come down to the very edges of the ravine. The slopes opposite were white and the watchtower suffused by a weary brightness which showed every crack, the irregular lines of every stone, like the wrinkles in the face of an aging man. But the shelf where Nancy stood was steeped in blackness. The girl was cold and miserably afraid, wondering why she had not gone back with Edward, for the tomb avenged her impudence by filling her mind with ghostly fears. Dawn seemed years away. Nancy imagined hostile shapes, things without heads, without limbs, creeping down the cliff behind her.

And at the moment when the tension of her nerves was intolerable she heard a noise, the sound of running feet, a low laugh, a scuffle in the trees. A heavy figure came running up the path, up the steps. The girl was too frightened to jump; instinctively she shrank below the railing of the platform. But the moonlight had betrayed her; she had been all too clearly outlined against the whiteness of the hill beyond. Suddenly she realized that strong arms had seized her, and lifted her from her crouching position, half torn the singlet from her shoulders in forcing her round to meet the savage vehemence of a kiss.

To Nancy this swift shame was unutterable. She had the Chinese loathing of a kiss as a disgusting act suited only to the dalliance of a brothel. She fought like a maddened lioness, scratching, biting, trying to claw the face of her assailant, while the man, checked for a moment, since evidently he had looked for complaisance, replied with cruel fury, ripping her vest open to the waist, choking her till the girl knew she was sinking hopelessly into submission. Just when she had too little strength to know or care what might follow she felt the arms of the man relax. Someone, she did not know who, caught her as she fell limp across the tottering railing.

"Good God!" said a voice in English. "It's Nancy! And I thought it was Kuei-lien."

The voice woke the fainting girl more effectively than a dash of icy water. She stood up abruptly, still bewildered, but understanding that the creature who had attacked her so unreasonably was her father; that he had mistaken her for his mistress. A swift rippling laugh revealed the presence of Kuei-lien herself, very much amused to see the daughter involved in the amorous chase she had been leading the father.

"You will be so boisterous, you clumsy fellow," she said in tart Chinese. "Fancy hugging your own daughter. How absurd!"

But the father was not amused. He turned angrily to Nancy.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded of the girl, who was trying to hold the torn fragments of her singlet over her breast. "What right have you to be spying on us like this?"

Nancy had never been addressed in such harsh tones.

"I was not spying," she stammered.

"You were spying; don't contradict me. You deserve to be beaten for this. Go on—get to your room. You are utterly shameless. And you too—" he said sharply to Kuei-lien, "you damned women are all the same, every one of you."

CHAPTER IV

Nancy got away gladly; she stumbled quickly into her room. The episode had made a rent across her childhood so that she could never again be the careless, innocent creature she was. The kiss was bad enough, an intolerable defilement, but the method of the kiss was so beastly that her mind had been wounded past the help of any quick remedy. Her part had been merely an accident; she could not wash away, however, the uncleanness, the sense of incest in the kiss she had received from her father.

She did not want the day to come now. She had no courage to meet the laughing person of Kuei-lien. The concubine very clearly was not embarrassed by the memory of last night's mishap.

"What a laughable business," she cried, "to be kissed by your own father! And how angry he was!"

"Do you call it laughable?" asked Nancy solemnly.

"Pooh!" said Kuei-lien, "don't take the thing so seriously. It was just play. If you choose to go mooning on a dark terrace you can't blame anybody for making mistakes. It was funny the way you fought—and your own father, too. What romantic sensations you must have had. Did you think the Emperor was kidnapping his beauty? What a violent lover he must have seemed."

Nancy blushed.

"I don't want to talk about it," she said. "It was shameful."

"How innocent you are," said Kuei-lien, still unabashed. "Shameful! It was disappointing, I admit, but not shameful. And such words from you, who have been so curious about marriage. How do you think husbands and wives spend their time? Writing scrolls, like you and Edward? You can be as fine a poet as you please, my dear, and paint charming pictures, and sit in a bamboo shelter with your teacup and your flute and your ink-stone like the heroines you read about, but your husband won't marry you for those things. He'll marry you for your face and your body, for this—and this—and this—" She touched the girl playfully on her cheeks and shoulders and thighs.

"That may be the way barbarians marry," objected Nancy; "that isn't our Chinese way."

"Our Chinese way!" Kuei-lien laughed. "Our Chinese way! What are you? You are not Chinese. Aren't you a barbarian yourself? You are English, and that is the English way."

"How do you know? You are not a wife. You are only my father's mistress. Your experience doesn't prove how a husband treats his wife. You have to do these things; that's what he bought you for."

Nancy's temper had got the better of her tact. Yet Kuei-lien controlled herself to a degree truly extraordinary for a Chinese woman. There was a dangerous flash in her eyes, but the concubine was content to treat the remarks as the petulant outburst of a child.

"Pooh! you are younger than I thought. You don't understand. Some day you will kneel to me for these words."

There was a gravity in this last comment so unlike the usual birdlike frivolity of Kuei-lien's that it left Nancy very much shaken. In her heart she recognized tacitly that the other girl was right. The episode of the night had shown the great gulf interposed between Kuei-lien's experience and her own. It was true: she did not understand. Nancy began to distrust her own defiant protests, the distinctions she had drawn between marriage and the harlotry of concubines, and remembered a hundred hints from the free-speaking women of the Herrick family, things which she had apprehended in the figurative way of a child. She did not have the optimism of Western maidens to help her. Love was not bound up with the myth of the "right man," so that Nancy, although in the first ardent flush of youth, picturing imaginative romance with some chosen stranger from that male world of which her father and her brother were the only representatives she had seen, had no real support against what seemed suddenly revealed as life hopelessly ugly.

In a night Nancy had become a rebel. But rebellion gave her no relief because it offered no hope. There was no bold plan to perform. Nancy never thought of escape to the West because the West meant nothing to her but a strange barbarous country with which she always was angry to hear herself connected. No taunt so roused her as the name of Englishman. The only fallacy she still retained was her trust in the superior refinement of Chinese ways. She saw nothing absurd in saying, "our Chinese ways," yet she and Edward were a race of their own, a race quite unique, who were entitled, not like Eurasians to the defects of two bloods, but to any advantage that might be gained from being Western-born and Chinese-trained.

Even their father was excluded from these privileges. He was an Englishman attempting imperfectly to assimilate the East. Nancy and Edward, without knowing it, made allowances for his case, and, in the midst of being fond of him, were subtly condescending over the little ways in which he failed to adapt his mind and his body, just as they remarked instantly the slight flaws, the little mistakes of accent and grammar, in his remarkable use of Chinese.

When the girl heard the next day that she with her brother had been summoned to an English class, she began to bristle. She went, of course, because she could not throw off in a moment the thought that the will of her father was law; nor could she alienate Edward's sympathy by an attitude she was too embarrassed to explain. But she went, inwardly protesting. Timothy Herrick was not noticeably different in his manner. He did not show, perhaps, quite so much of the whimsical amusement he usually evinced when glancing at his two sober little pupils. Nevertheless he sat unperturbed and Nancy, while envying his calmness, hated it.

His old friends would not have recognized their slim debonair acquaintance of former years in the portly gentleman who was presiding over this classroom. There were more alterations than dress could account for, more alterations than the exchange of tweeds and flannels for flowered silk could explain. The Chinese dress with its gown of pale blue silk and its jacket of cut velvet was the more picturesque, but to those who had known the careless elegance of the past there must be apparent a marked falling off in pride of appearance, hints of slovenliness, in proof of which it was hard, none the less, to cite any convincing detail. Nor could increased age explain why an Englishman known for his alertness, his quick tact, had given way to the heavy pompousness of the mandarin. The rotund belly, the puffy cheeks, the bristling moustache seemed to betray a man whose heart was cowardly, who was trying to disguise by his bluff exterior the real truth, that he had relaxed his standards and amended his life to the pleasures that were easily obtained.

Nancy went through her lessons with an unobliging surliness which Herrick could not but see. He met his daughter's defiance in the same spirit. Herrick had been autocrat so long that it was abnormally hard for him to see mishaps from any side but his own. He was angry and aggrieved at last night's mistake, but more because it had put him to ridicule than because he could conceive the force of the shock to Nancy's pride. It was preposterous to have been fooled thus into kissing his own daughter; Herrick was thoroughly annoyed by his own loss of face; but what right had the girl to sit in judgment over her own father, as she seemed all too palpably to be doing? What right had she even to think of finding fault? His conduct was not hers to criticize. The kiss was only a kiss, nothing to her to brood about; but her temerity in spying upon her father, that struck at the very roots of obedience.

"Nancy, I have a few words to say to you," he said, beckoning Edward to go. The girl rose. Herrick did not like the candor of her clear eyes.

"Has your teacher taught you to stare at your father?" he asked sharply.

Nancy looked down, but not humbly. Herrick surveyed her with a curious detachment. Ought she not to kneel, he wondered—the precedents for Chinese behavior failed him at times. Perhaps it was enough that she should stand. There was no harm, at least, in allowing a few moments of silence to make his ensuing words impressive. So he turned to his water pipe and gurgled a few puffs of blue smoke while the daughter remained in rigid but none the less sullen attention. At last the man ended the silence with well-chosen Chinese phrases.

"I ordered your lessons this morning," he began, "because I wished to see by your behavior whether you were ashamed of the very great offense you have done. For a daughter to spy upon her father—that is unpardonable. You are sixteen; I am fifty. What I do is no concern of yours; what I do you cannot be expected to understand. Your place is in your own room at night; it is a scandal for you to be anywhere else. Yet I find you following me around, causing me shame by your immodest curiosity; and not only that, but all this morning you have sat here stiff-necked, stubborn, seeming to reproach me, as though I were answerable to you for my conduct. What excuse can you offer for your shameless behavior?"

"I was not spying," replied Nancy.

"You were not spying? Then what were you doing there at two o'clock in the morning?"

"I could not sleep. I was looking at the moonlight."

To allow such an excuse would have undermined Herrick's just cause for anger. He could not hear of it.

"Who taught you to lie?" he sneered. "I have no patience with such nonsense. Your business is to answer me, not to argue with me."

Greatly restraining herself, Nancy said nothing.

"Of course you were spying," Herrick continued, "and you haven't had the grace to be sorry. Now, by way of making amends, I want you to kowtow three times to me."

"It is right that a daughter should kowtow to her father," said Nancy simply, "but I am not sorry."

"Then you may stand here till you are sorry."

He had asked the impossible. After two hours of silence, during which the girl stood like a rigid statue, Herrick realized that there was a sturdiness in his daughter's nature which he might break but assuredly could not bend. He began to admire the endurance of the child while he grew more and more oppressed by the discomfort of his own position.

"Well, that will be enough," he said, trying to gloss the fact of his defeat, "I think you have learned your lesson and have been punished sufficiently. You needn't stay any longer: you may go."

To his amazement, Nancy knelt down and bowed her head to the ground three times.

"I am sorry I could not obey my father," she said.

"What is the child!" wondered Herrick, when she had gone. "Just when I think she is hopelessly English, she outvies the spirit of the Analects themselves. Is she English or is she Chinese?"

CHAPTER V

The answer was of such importance that Herrick neglected Kuei-lien in his effort to find it. Herrick's wrath had gathered for a great outburst; and then Nancy, by kneeling, by her sign of reverence for his position if not for the man, had dissipated all the heaped-up vapors of anger. They had passed like summer lightning. The man grew sunny again.

Not for months had he shown such friendliness for his children. He took them walking, busied them collecting flowers, led them up the heights of the opposite ravine to see the desolate beacon tower. Nancy did not talk much on these excursions. Her spirit was not yet at ease; the rebellious impulses, however, sought outlet in the unusual exercise. They spent themselves, for the present, on the hills which taxed her legs and revealed to her eyes so many novelties of sight. Edward, on the other hand, prattled continuously, amusing his father by his voluble excitement over every strange blossom and his certainty that every cave contained a leopard or a tiger.

"Ah, there's English in you, my lad," said the father wistfully, "you ought to be playing cricket."

"What is cricket?" asked the boy, instantly curious.

"I'll show you," said Herrick, beaming from indulgent memories of his own youth. After searching out a clear place, he constructed implements as primitive as they were ingenious, a pitch of mountain turf cleared of boulders, pine twigs for stumps, and cones for bails so insecurely perched that the afternoon breeze put up the best of the bowling. Edward combined the conflicting duties of bats-man and wicket-keeper while his father hurled large cones down the pitch and Nancy, stationed in the slips, invariably fumbled the rare ball Edward lifted in her direction.

So absorbed were the players in their very rudimentary game that an unexpected cry of "Well hit, sir," burst upon them like a thunderbolt. Edward's desired tiger could not have startled them more thoroughly.

Nancy turned to run, but she saw her brother gazing with wide eyes and open mouth till her own fear could not keep her from seeking with half-averted face the object of his astonishment. She saw two men walking toward her father. They were not Chinese; that she knew instantly, for they wore strange white helmets and shirts open at the throat and short khaki trousers and thick foreign boots. They carried knapsacks and strange black boxes such as Nancy, in her inexperience, did not recognize as cameras. Each of them swung a stout cane. Could they be bandits, Nancy wondered, her heart beating in alarm; they looked extremely fierce. Then she realized by a flash of insight that she was seeing the spectacle she had looked forward to—the spectacle of foreigners from the mythical lands of the West.

"Wait a minute," called out one of the two men, removing his hat courteously and exposing a shock of blond hair, "wanchee take picture, allee same photograph."

He had not realized that the three people he was approaching were not Chinese. Excited by observing what unmistakably was a wicket, crude though it might be, he thought he had stumbled upon some prototype of his own national game being played by the aborigines of the mountains.

"Perhaps it's been played since the days of Yao and Shun," he told his companion; "nothing ever changes in China. Some dear old lady may find a new proof that we're all descended from the Ten Lost Tribes. I certainly mustn't miss this picture. Think how well it would look in 'Leaves from an Archaeologist's Notebook' or, at the worst, 'A Nomad W.G. Scores a Boundary.'"

"Well, he's not a nomad nor a W.G. and I'm not sure he's even playing cricket," said the other; "but don't let small scruples interfere with your picture."

"I won't," said the first, who was considering how he might approach the game unobserved till Edward, catching a cone in mid-flight and thwacking it back into the ravine, provoked his shout of "Well hit, sir." Nothing was left except to walk forward openly in the hope that the three strangely assorted players might prove amenable to his wish. So he shouted emphatically in the direction of Herrick's portly figure, trying to check visible symptoms of retreat. "Just a minute, wanchee take picture, wanchee take picture, one minute can do."

"Oh, do you?" inquired Herrick with the dryest of accents. "And to whom am I indebted for your acquaintance?"

The man stopped abruptly, while Herrick used the chance to muster off his children. Without further words he went coldly by, as though he were passing two strangers in the crowds of Regent Street, and the two children, excited by this encounter, were too much afraid of their father to give the men another glance.

"Well, what do you make of that?" asked the astonished intruder of his companion.

"You were right in one point, at least," said the latter, "it was cricket. But I don't think the knowledge is going to help any dear old lady's theory of the Lost Tribes. That was certainly a stony British stare."

"And a stony British retort. What on earth do you suppose he was doing here masquerading in Chinese clothes? And the girl and boy too? They must have been English; they weren't Chinese. An uncommonly handsome girl at that. If I hadn't been paralyzed by the old gentleman's answer, I should have taken a picture to prove we weren't dreaming. They might at least have stopped, and not run away in this barbarous fashion."

"Yes, but what an uncommon pair of fools we must have seemed, shouting pidgin English at them! No wonder they were crusty."

Nancy and Edward knew the time was not opportune for questioning their father. But when they were home again and safe in their own quarter, their tongues seethed with comments on this meeting. Kuei-lien and the old amah joined in the discussion and were able to supply more details about the men, who were members of a party, it seemed, that was occupying a large bungalow in one of the valleys some distance beyond. It was a settlement, in fact, to which foreigners came in the summer. There were women too, said the nurse, and girls dressed in foreign clothes; "just like your mother," she continued, "but oh no, not so beautiful, and not such splendid clothes."

She went into rapt ecstasies on the subject of Nancy's mother, how she looked when the Admiral came, and what she said, and the way she wore her jewels, till Nancy, who had listened to these discursions many times and knew that the garrulous record always veered round to distasteful details of her own infancy, how she had given her bottle to the dog or used the Consul's top-hat for a lavatory, cut the nurse short by asking how she could get a glimpse of these Western girls.

The amah looked suspiciously at Kuei-lien, whom she did not trust.

"No, I'm afraid your father would not like it."

"Oh, I don't think he would mind, if you didn't boast about it," interposed Kuei-lien.

"You ask him," said the nurse, scenting danger for her children in the affable assurances of the concubine.

Kuei-lien and Nancy had not been cordial since the affair of the kiss. Kuei-lien had the long memory of her race, a memory quite prepared to avenge insults on the third and fourth generation if no earlier chance came, and she had not forgotten Nancy's slighting words. The score, in fact, had been increased by the new kindliness between Herrick and his children; this kindliness seemed to grow at the cost of her own hold upon the father. Since her ascendancy began this had been the first falling away of Herrick's affection.

The concubine, knowing too well the hazards of an old man's fickleness, did not propose risking her mastery merely to indulge the claims of two children. With all her bent for headstrong passion she was a cool creature, resourceful, intelligent, able not only to captivate the heart of her elderly husband by daring use of beauty, but to calculate to a nicety the effects she meant to achieve. She wished place, position, power, desirable ends toward which Herrick's infatuation could assist. She knew the force of the proverb that there is no fool like an old one and played cleverly on its truth, that, when the time should come, when Herrick had gone and her friend the t'ai-t'ai, then the despised fifth wife should be enjoying the harvest she had sowed.

But the place of Nancy and Edward in the household economy had puzzled her. They stood in the way of her success, for, like all Westerners, they followed a disturbing logic of their own and did not yield to the good old precedents of the Orient. She had not sat back with arms folded, however, like the t'ai-t'ai, resigning the problem to fate. Fate was indiscriminate as lightning in the way it struck, a very clumsy agent for nice ends. Kuei-lien believed in the art of directing fate, and now, after her study of Nancy and Edward, she had come to one certainty—that they must be returned to the West whence they had come.

She was glad, then, to hear of their encounter with two Englishmen. Kuei-lien knew by hearsay the free and easy intercourse by which Western men and maids fostered romance; what she had learned considerably overshot the mark, allowing it to seem all the more plausible that here was an easy way for disposing of Nancy. So she renewed her friendliness with the girl, doing her best to laugh away the morbid accident of the kiss. Their relations were never quite so comfortable as before; but the child was young and excited by her first glimpse of two strangers, and she was curious enough to hear eagerly all that Kuei-lien suggested.

With Kuei-lien's encouragement it became a habit for Nancy and Edward to go walking by themselves. No one had forbidden them. Several days of rain and Herrick's annoyance at meeting impudent intruders from his own country had interrupted the father's inclination to stroll with his children. The nurse was busy managing the house; because of her bound feet she could not have walked even had she wished. So the brother and sister assumed tacit consent for little excursions to the bottom of the ravine, whither Kuei-lien often went with them. Very happy they were to lie on the sun-baked rocks, where they could watch the dragon flies skim between the boulders and could toss leaves into the limpid pools of the stream.

These were mere short flights, a testing of the wings. Kuei-lien pretended much interest in the place where Nancy and Edward had met their Englishmen and when she suggested going there she noticed the flush of color which betrayed Nancy's own eagerness.

"Yes, there are beautiful flowers there," said the younger girl quickly.

"Aha, my child," thought Kuei-lien, "it's not the flowers you will be seeking."

There were flowers in great abundance, harebells, Michaelmas daisies, campanula, single larkspur velvety indigo in color. Of all these Nancy picked lavishly and then piled her blue spoils on the grass where she knelt looking at them, a little sorry because she had picked them and could never give back the radiant lives she had taken.

"What lots of flowers you have plucked," said Kuei-lien, smiling at Nancy's thoughtfulness. "Are you glad?"

"No," said Nancy, "I am sad for them. They die so quickly."

"What does it matter? There will be hundreds more to-morrow."

"Yes, but not these."

"They give us happiness; isn't that enough?"

"I have picked too many," said Nancy; "one would have given me happiness. Oh, my flowers, my flowers," she cried, "I am sorry because I killed you! One would have given me happiness, yet I have taken so many."

Impulsively she turned to Kuei-lien with a serious look in her dark eyes.

"Is that all they live for, just to give us happiness?"

"Just to give us happiness," Kuei-lien echoed.

"Then to whom do we give happiness? What do we live for?"

"We are flowers, too," laughed the older girl, amused by the soberness of Nancy's question. "We give happiness to men."

Her reply was not meant to be flippant, but from Kuei-lien's lips it came too truthfully. It stirred in Nancy's newly informed, her bitterly informed, heart a distaste for her womanly fortune.

She looked down the rugged valley, saw the mellow colors of the hills, a distant gleam of the plain, all suffused through a patina of golden sunshine, and a shadow troubled her youthful face at the thought that she could not belong to these forever, that she could not be like the yellow butterfly hovering above the flowers or like the hawk Edward blithely was chasing, but must be cooped up amid the tattle of women's quarters to give—the picture stuck in her brain—to give happiness to men.

The unhurried tones of a bell sounded from some far recess of the mountains. Instinctively Nancy bent her head to the ground. Three times before her little heap of blossoms she touched her forehead to the grass.

"Why are you doing that?" asked Kuei-lien in surprise.

"I am worshiping my flowers," said Nancy simply, "for I am going to be a nun."

CHAPTER VI

Nancy's sincerity shocked her companion into silence for the moment. But it was not likely to be a long silence. When they had shaken off the glamour of that golden afternoon and walked moodily home, stilling even Edward's chatter by a dumbness for which he could divine no reason, Kuei-lien began to recover the spirits which Nancy's perverse temper had dampened. "A nun!" The joke was too good to keep. Supported by the comfortable materialism of the dinner table with its bowls of steaming white rice, she could wax merry at Nancy's expense; the ghosts of blue flowers could not enter here to throw their depressing spell. Kuei-lien was like a man who has been through great fear and now tries to preserve the illusion of courage by laughing at the meagre thing that had frightened him.

Edward readily became her ally and laughed louder than any at his sister's new whim.

"You mustn't eat any meat," he jested, pushing the bowl of pork balls out of Nancy's reach, "and you must shave your head. Bring a knife, amah, and some incense and we'll make her a nun now. It will be lots of fun burning the nine spots on her head. Ah, but you will be a pretty sight, Nancy, just like a bald-headed old woman. When you come begging, we'll give you rice crusts. O-mi-t'o-fu! O-mi-t'o-fu!"

Nancy took his teasing good-naturedly, avoiding his attempt to seize her hair and making a nimble raid on the pork balls with her chopsticks; she was not yet Buddhist enough to forgo the delights of meat. She did not even resent the aspersions uttered against her future calling and listened composedly enough to tales about the depravity of nuns. They were all bad or ignorant women, said Kuei-lien, and became nuns because their parents were simpletons. No respectable girl ought even to talk of nuns, and if she became one her family could never lift up their heads again, such would be the disgrace she had brought. The old nurse had her share to add to the bantering: they were such dirty creatures. How could they have time for prayers when they were being consumed by vermin? And you can't kill the vermin, hai! that was forbidden; you must let them eat till they were fat. What was the holiness of being eaten by bugs?

The old nurse had been contaminated by the Western veneration of the bath.

Nancy listened to it all with the amused smile of one who enjoys being the topic of conversation. She was not seriously touched by their dissuasion because her latest ambition was still far from taking deep root. Suddenly attracted by the purity of heaven and earth and growing things, she had put into words an unformed wish, but the wish had no kinship to the sordid details of the dining-room gossip. There was momentary longing to be caught up from the turmoil of humankind, but the longing did not persist. Nancy was glad enough to jest with Kuei-lien and the amah, she needed the sight of Edward's cheerful face and relished the savoriness of the evening meal. It was good to be well fed and comfortable, good to sleep soundly in a warm bed. So Nancy felt no urgency to resist those who teased her, even though the impulse remained more faithful than she guessed, a passion to become one with the clean beauty of the sunlight and the blue sky.

She went to bed happily tired, but a glimpse of the stars, after she had puffed out her candle, was like seeing a golden net overspreading the earth to make her dreams captive.

Herrick alone did not ridicule Nancy's wish.

"Why shouldn't she be a nun if she wants?" he asked Kuei-lien, when the girl jokingly mentioned his daughter's new ambition.

"You encourage a freakish ambition like that?" exclaimed Kuei-lien, unable to believe her ears.

"I don't say I encourage it; I haven't thought of it at all. But if Nancy with all her heart chooses to be a nun, I shouldn't stop her."

"Nuns are bad, dissolute women."

"Some may be, but not all."

"'Ten nuns: nine bad, and one mad,'" scoffed the concubine.

"Are you happy?" asked the man, giving the argument a disconcerting shift.

"Madly happy," Kuei-lien replied, hiding by a smile of curious irony not only all signs that the question had startled her but every hint as to what she meant by her answer.

"Well, I am not, and I'm sure I don't wish to deny Nancy her own way of seeking peace when mine has failed."

Kuei-lien shrugged her shoulders over the bad taste of such frankness.

"You take her child's notions too seriously," she said.

"Yes, but what am I to do with her?" inquired Herrick, openly acknowledging his perplexity over the problem he would not admit had been vexing him.

"Do you ask advice from the lowest of your servants? Surely her poor wisdom cannot solve matters of such difficulty."

Herrick knew that Kuei-lien was jeering at him behind her studied modesty.

"Don't talk this farcical nonsense to me," he cried, brusquely impatient of the Eastern ways it had been his habit to extol. "If your poor wisdom is able to criticize the girl's own plan, it is able to suggest something better."

"Why shouldn't she marry? No father who loves his daughter neglects to have her married. She isn't sick; why should she be a nun?"

"Marrying is not easy and you know it. Suppose I call the matchmaker; what will she find for me? Can she find a son-in-law good enough for my daughter, a son-in-law with the same learning, the same training?"

"That was your fault in wasting money to have her taught."

"The money wasn't wasted. That's not my meaning at all. What I mean is that families of her rank and education will be afraid to betroth their sons to her because she isn't Chinese. Yet in speech and ways, even in the color of her hair, she is as thoroughly Chinese as any girl they could get. Healthier too and better looking. But the good families would be too conservative to consider the match and even a swaggering squint-eyed upstart of a returned student would think he was doing Nancy a favor to be her husband."

"Why marry her to a Chinese? Haven't you men in the West?"

This was the obviously pertinent question Herrick himself had been facing. He made up for argument by an outburst of temper.

"Why do you think I have gone to all this trouble these many years to have my children reared as Chinese?"

"I don't know," confessed Kuei-lien.

"Because the West has nothing but a beastly machine-ridden civilization, nothing but thoughts of merchandise and profit, fattening the bodies and thinning the souls of its people. A Westerner couldn't live in these mountains, for example, without wanting to dam the stream and make an electric plant. He wouldn't see the color of the hills, the light of the dawning sun shining on stones and trees; he would suffer an unbearable itch to change them, to make them useful. Bah! Every one of them is a materialist; none of them know the finer relationships of life. I haven't brought up my daughter to be the wife of a bank clerk."

"Oh," said Kuei-lien blankly, implying by her colorless response to Herrick's enthusiasm that she considered him a palpable fool.

"No, I won't destroy all she has learned," the man went on, "I won't make her a Western barbarian by marrying the girl to a man who can talk of nothing but golf and horses and the fluctuations of rubber shares. She would much better be a nun. Some day I think I shall divide everything I own between you—that would be more seemly than having the five of you fight for it after I die—then I'll go into the mountains with Nancy and Edward and enjoy a hermitage of my own."

"I'll go with you," mocked Kuei-lien. "You won't be happy without women in your hermitage."

"You'll go where the money goes. I am too old to be deceived by sweet phrases. Any man can be let alone if he is poor enough. It is only the rich who are burdened with women."

Kuei-lien was intensely amused by this expression of contempt.

"What a funny man you are," she exclaimed, laughing merrily, as she threw her arms round his neck in the foreign way she had needed small prompting to learn. "You are not a hermit yet; ai ya, you pitiable fellow, to be so heavily burdened with women!"

Herrick, like Nancy, was content to postpone his dreams of the monastery.

Not to forget them, however. When a chance offered, he called for Nancy in order to question her. He had never discussed marriage with the girl; it was not the custom for a father to mention such subjects to his daughter. But to raise the question in English seemed excusable. So the man, seeking help from Nancy herself on the difficult problem of her future, found she listened decorously in the Western tongue to matters she would have blushed to hear, had they been proposed to her in Chinese.

"They tell me you wish to be a nun," said the father, smiling while he spoke.

"I made some undutiful remarks," acknowledged the girl, afraid her father would laugh at the enormity of her desire. "I cannot go against my father's wishes."

"Very properly said," exclaimed Herrick, not really at ease in his role of a Confucian father. He had not been born to it. He could never quite believe Nancy's filial attitude was genuine; the words, sounding so odd in English, were like speeches rehearsed for a play. He at least was consciously theatrical, when he answered them. "Very properly said," he approved, "but a father's wishes are those which will make his daughter happy."

This was the way he expressed himself, solemn words comporting the dignity of a parent, though what he really would have given worlds to say was, "Kiss me, child; sit on my knee, rub your hands through my hair, and let's stop pretending we're grown-ups. We've years before we need bother over a frivolous subject like marriage." Alas, the Confucian canons did not permit such playfulness.

"I have been thinking about your marriage," Herrick went on, stumbling pitifully for words after this regretful glimpse of all the demonstrative pleasantries of affection he had lost. "It is time we considered these things."

Nancy became visibly paler.

"These are new times, new manners," he said, momentarily homesick for the schooldays when he first learned the phrase in its noble classical context—how long, long ago that was! Who would have thought he would be quoting it to this strange dark-haired daughter! "New times, new manners. Formerly we arranged these things early"—he was the Chinese father now—"and we looked for peace only when our daughters were safely married. We are a better generation, Nancy, better in a few things at least, and we want peace for our daughters too, not merely selfish peace for ourselves."

Nancy stood entranced. She heard his slow words not because they seemed to have any meaning but because there was a grave rhythm to his speech which suggested peace of another kind from anything the painful stumblings of the human tongue could evoke; his speech went with the drowsy sound of the pines, the noise of falling water in the ravine. Why knit the brows in a feeble effort to conjure up peace when peace encompassed them, when it folded them in the hypnotic embrace of the sunshine, giving these transitory moments their eternal quality?

Herrick struggled to rouse himself.

"How shall we marry you, Nancy?" he asked abruptly. "What kind of husband do you want: 'Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief'?"

What made that jingle come faintly back from the day when he first learned it? He really must stop this silly habit of letting outworn, long-forgotten phrases run through his mind. It was childish. "What kind of husband do you want, Nancy?"

The question cut shabbily into the passionless quiet of Nancy's trance. The sunlight and the wind seemed to have gone on and left her behind them. All that lovable outdoor world was receding as life itself might recede from a dying man. Frantic anxiety rent the girl's heart, a wish to rush out and call on all these things to wait, not to hurry so fast, lest she never again hear the birds singing or play with Edward through the brilliant hours of the morning.

"What kind of husband do you want, Nancy?"

"I don't know," she answered.

"Do you really want to be a nun?"

"I don't know."

Not even that could she answer.

"It is very hard for me to decide," the father complained gently enough, "unless I know what you do really wish."

"I want to stay like this forever—forever!" suddenly blurted out the girl, done with mild evasion, and repeating the last phrase so that she surely must be understood.

Herrick felt old. The interview had sapped his blood of its buoyancy.

"Ah, if we could, if we only could," he muttered. He could hardly trust himself to look at Nancy. She brought to his mind the defiant beauty of her mother; it was no use to-day trying to hold his mind back from rambling through roadways of the past. "No, Nancy, neither you nor I nor anyone can stay like this forever. I thought I could once. We grow up in spite of ourselves, child. The happy times are just a day, a short day at that, and then—finish."

The tension was eased by this last bit of prosiness.

"Well, we're not getting forward with our difficulty," Herrick was able to say in a more matter-of-fact voice. "I won't ask you any more questions because I don't think you know yourself what you wish. I have just one more thing I want you to do; I want you to bring me the most precious thing you have, the thing you like better than anything else, no matter what it is. That will help me."

Herrick waited curiously for his commission to be performed and teased himself imagining what the girl would bring. He would know in what direction her fancy ran more clearly than she could tell him. "Butcher, baker, candle-maker—" How could he stop this accursed rhyme from ringing in his head?

Nancy was gone a long time but at last she returned.

"What did you bring?" her father asked.

The girl held in her hand a flat object wrapped in silk. She took off the covering and to his surprise Herrick saw a little wooden tablet, carved and gilded, and so exquisitely done he could hardly believe Nancy's confession that she and Edward had made it.

"It is the spirit of our mother," she said in Chinese.

Herrick took the fragile object from her hands. He looked at the golden characters so faithfully written. Their meaning he knew well enough, but his eyes seemed too blurred to read the letters distinctly. With great difficulty he restrained himself from falling low before this little thing of wood. The task of deciding Nancy's fate was too much for him. He was tired.

"You are your mother's daughter," he said. "Nancy, Nancy, Nancy—I cannot choose for you."

CHAPTER VII

Kuei-lien tried in vain to learn what had been said between father and daughter. She could get no clue. Herrick smilingly told her that Nancy was too young to think of marriage. "We needn't bother about it till the time comes." She was afraid to ask open questions from the child, who was mistress of a baffling, innocent reserve at times, which outwitted the clever fencing of the concubine.

Kuei-lien was not idly curious. Her acute instinct told her plainly that momentous things had been said, things closely concerned with her own fortune. She read this much in the faces of the man and the girl. She read news of defeat and was vexed to find herself worsted by an enemy she could not circumvent.

Already it was August, the last sultriness of summer; the terrific rains, which would not come again for ten months, had poured down the mountain side and swamped the plains. Even the rockiest slopes were a lush green, while camels, ungainly brutes in charge of little naked boys who guided their movements with a well-aimed pebble, had excellent pasturage at the foot of the hills. The days would be clear now, but soon there would be frost; the leaves of the maples would change color. Herrick detested cold weather, would be restless for the warmer comforts of town. If there were to be any profit from this solitary retreat to the mountains Kuei-lien knew it was time to make haste.

She altered her tactics, recognizing now that the episode of the kiss, laughable though it had seemed, had snapped her hold upon Nancy. So she diverted her attention to Edward, who was a quick, lively youngster, ready to venture forth and slay monsters. The watchtower was always a goad to the boy's imagination, making him aware that he was treading the byways of an ancient hunting park where the Tatar princes used to send swift arrows to the heart of their quarry. Edward prepared his own bow and arrows while Kuei-lien stirred him to mimic the exploits of his dead heroes. He took advantage of Herrick's nodding eye and wandered far afield, achieving merciless execution upon the trees and stones which were all these degenerate days offered in place of the tigers and bears and antlered stags men once hunted. He did get one thrilling glimpse of a fox, which he magnified in his excitement to a leopard, and he often twanged his bow ineffectually in the wake of rabbits and pheasants. His most vigilant guard, however, was against foreigners. Against their approach he had built a little beacon tower of stone, and he secreted dry sticks from the all-seeing eye of the fuel-gatherer so that when the time came, when alien hordes approached threatening from the West, he could light a warning flame and save the golden roofs of Peking!

Inevitably Edward pressed Nancy into his play. What was the good of a sister unless she lent herself to something useful? Nancy was quick enough to justify her own usefulness and not content to take merely passive roles, to be nothing better than the Mongol foe or the harassed tiger, which Edward with traditions unconsciously derived from the boys of his English ancestral country thought a girl and a sister predestined to play. The two children climbed and played and quarreled and smiled again and explored devious sheep tracks with a freedom they had never known; they grew bolder and bolder in the distances they ventured, plunging down the gravelly paths before the sun was high and trying to outstretch the light of the evening twilight.

Kuei-lien knew just how lengthy was the chase Edward and Nancy were leading. Stealthily she filled the boy with the hearsay she picked up, the whereabouts of the foreigners, how they had been seen roaming near the White Horse Temple or the Clear Spring Pagoda, not only men, but women and children, always seeking some far-away place where they spread a white cloth on the ground and sat down promiscuously to eat food from tins and bottles.

One afternoon, when Kuei-lien held their father amused and little inclined to disturb them with projects of his own, Edward drew Nancy aside and whispered his plans for the most daring raid yet projected. He intended nothing less than to scale the heights which overlooked the summer village of the foreigners.

"I shall need all my arrows," he said.

"You can't shoot them," Nancy scoffed.

"I can shoot at them, anyway."

"Well, don't ask me to carry the bow if it gets heavy."

Edward grunted amiably and led his sister through the sleeping house. An air of mystery came naturally to the occasion, for he knew the expedition they were starting on was not one to win the blessing of his father. Walking was hot so early in the afternoon, but the boy and girl trudged forward valiantly, two slim figures in blue jackets and trousers who startled an occasional wood-cutter, when they stopped to ask the way, making him wonder what part of the realms of Han produced such unusual faces.

"We can see them from there," said Edward, pointing to a ridge of furrowed rock.

"Can we ever get to it?" asked Nancy. "It seems days away."

"Tired already?"

Nancy was too proud to be outdone by a younger brother. She redoubled her efforts, hot and weary though she was, and felt rewarded when they reached the remains of an imperial hunting forest, a grove of stout pines shimmering with silver bark, which thrilled the girl by their stateliness.

"There is a temple," she said. "Let's rest a few minutes. Perhaps they will bring us tea."

"It's late," said Edward anxiously. The ridge was still a mile or two distant. "We have to go back, you know. We can't waste time."

But Nancy suddenly felt overcome by a thirstiness which would yield to nothing but many cups of boiling tea. She hurried toward the red-washed walls of the monastery, while Edward, whose conscience could not quell his own thirst, followed only half unwillingly.

The temple was neither large nor beautiful, but it was cool. They passed the four monstrous figures of the Heavenly Kings and threw barely a look at the fat little Maitreya with distended belly, who sat in a glass case, cheerfully oblivious of the scowling guardians of the portal. Beyond the first court with its iron incense-burner a monk greeted them, uttering the mystical name, to which they replied in his own words, "O-mi-t'o-fu." He led them to a table by the door and left them surveying the gilded company of the gods while he brought hot water to make an infusion of tea in the cracked cups.

"Oughtn't we to give him money?" suggested Edward. "I didn't bring any."

"We'll bring it next time," said Nancy, determined that nothing should stand between her and the tea she craved.

Edward, however, was too honest not to tell the monk and was easier in mind when the latter deprecated all talk of payment. Another monk, fingering his beads, came and sat down beside the children. Nancy did not like him so well; he showed brown discolored teeth when he laughed and his eyes protruded like the eyes in the fierce images behind him.

"You are foreigners?" he asked.

"No," said Edward, scornfully, "we are Chinese."

The monk treated this as an excellent jest and repeated it to his companion, as though Edward's fluent Chinese needed translation. He asked the other usual questions, how old they were, who were their family, where they were going, but to every word he gave an impertinent accent which Nancy could not keep from resenting.

"Let's go," she said to Edward in English, "I don't want any more tea."

"You are foreigners," exclaimed the monk in triumph, convinced by this utterance of an unfamiliar tongue.

"We are not foreigners," Edward stoutly objected; "my father is a Chinese official."

The man laughed again.

"I don't like him," said Nancy, again in English.

"Pooh," was Edward's response, "you can't expect manners from a priest."

"I don't care. I am not going to stay any longer. We shall never get home."

Edward stood up too, apologizing profusely because he had brought no money and promising faithfully that he would recompense their trouble on his next visit. The monks would not hear of excuses; they would never have considered taking money for so mean an act of simple hospitality. The boy, of course, knew their words were spoken merely from politeness, but he felt so encouraged by their affable courtesy as to inquire the shortest way to the ridge they were seeking.

"Oh, from our back door it is only a few steps," replied his yellow-toothed host. "I'll show you."

He preceded them round the three great Buddhas who sat in repose on lotus flowers, stopping first to point out to them the wizened embalmed figure of the holy man of the temple, an old abbot whose sanctified flesh had resisted the process of decay. The children looked with awe at the shriveled body over which a cloak of faded red satin had been thrown. Its clawlike finger nails, the sparse hairs protruding from the gilt which did not hide the wrinkles of the face, the puny withered legs on which the dead man sat, reminded them of a monkey profanely set up beneath a canopy of gold and scarlet. The sight filled them with horror. Nancy gladly hurried into the courtyard beyond and followed the direction the monk pointed while he waited for Edward, who wanted one more look at the hideous corpse.

She passed through a door, took a step or two, then paused in alarm. This was a room, not a passage. She must have taken the wrong turning. Before she had sufficient presence of mind to go back, she heard a grating noise and wheeled round just in time to see the grinning lips of the monk as he slammed the door in her face. There followed a creaking of wooden bolts. She dashed frantically to the door, but, as she anticipated all too correctly, it would not yield.

For the moment she was too much frightened over what might be happening to Edward to consider her own peril. She heard his voice crying shrilly, "What have you done with my sister?" then the voice of the monk grunting, "Catch the little rat." After this came noise of a scuffle and an exclamation of pain, then some cursing which seemed to show that Edward had outwitted the man who was trying to capture him. The noise went with a rush into the hall beyond so that Nancy, whose heart was beating tumultuously, could not follow the further fortunes of her brother. She was in an agony of fear for his safety and looked wildly round the room to see what she could do. There was the first and obvious precaution of drawing the inner bolts of the door so that she was secure for the present from any but a violent attempt to break into the chamber.

As a matter of fact, Edward had done well. The instant he realized the evil purpose of the monk he had drawn his bow tight, suddenly glad and proud of the weapon Nancy had derided. When the monk rushed forward to seize him, Edward had let his arrow fly, catching his adversary a blow in the pit of the stomach which effectually checked the attack. The man took some seconds to regain his breath. They were enough for Edward to run swiftly across the courtyards to the outer hall of the temple where the other monk was still fumbling with the gates. He was too slow. Edward eluded him and dashed down the path till after a flight of several hundred yards he realized no one was pursuing. Then he paused. The exhilaration of his doughty resistance forsook him. He wanted to boast to Nancy about his prowess as a marksman; he had vanquished a real enemy. But there came the stupefying memory that Nancy herself was in great danger and that he must save her.

Nancy was not only in great danger but sadly depressed by the quiet which ensued upon Edward's escape. She did not have even the comfort of knowing that the boy was free. The sound of excited voices came from a distant part of the monastery but no clue to what had happened.

The girl looked anxiously about her prison. It was a bare, whitewashed room, fortunately with only the one door, but also without a vestige of furniture which could help her in climbing to the high square windows. She tried jumping in hope of grasping the wooden frame, but the effort was too great. Her hands slipped uselessly down the rough tiles. After wearing herself out in frantic leaps, she sat down exhausted on the floor, sobbing convulsively as she realized that her only chance of escape depended upon Edward—the possibility that he had been more successful and got away to call help.

This passive ordeal was heart-rending, for Nancy had ample time to remember all the tales of monks and their evil doings, which the women of the household were wont to relate with much gloating zest. She was under no illusions about their lust, their greed, their cruelty, their perverted ways. She had heard too many stories about young girls kidnapped and held in lewd bondage while their families searched for years, unable to secure any hint of where they had been taken; she knew too that these lonely monasteries often were the haunt of bandits who recruited their wives from the guileless women who came to worship; they were places where rascals hid children while they extorted ransom from wealthy parents. Only the other day Nancy had been told of a boy whose ears had been cut off and sent by post to his parents to hurry payment of the money the robbers had demanded. Would they treat Edward this way?—or herself?

She tried to avoid pondering the details of her own fate, but she could not blot them out of mind. She would not yield, she vowed, but she guessed the ruthless torturing ways of these men when they wished to bend a handsome girl to their will. In a spurt of energy she jumped up to examine the fastenings of the door. They were strong. She took off the garters of brilliant orange elastic which she used, like modern Chinese girls, now that the fad of silk stockings had ousted the old foot wrappings. If the worst came to the worst she might be able to hang herself from the bolts on the door; alas, her experiments in the performance of suicide were not very convincing: the garters were too short and if she used the string which held her trousers in place she might practise too successfully and give finality to a rehearsal which was meant to be tentative. Yet the interest of examining the articles of her clothing for their possible use in suicide had the paradoxical result of cheering the girl and diverting her from the extreme depths of morbid terror. It was like planning a game to think how self-destruction could be effected by the limited means at her command. Nancy became more light-hearted over the problem of this danger which had swooped down so unexpectedly from the gayety of a summer stroll. The temple, at all events, had relapsed into quiet. The girl's courage was not put too quickly to the crisis of defending her door.

CHAPTER VIII

Edward's elation vanished when he thought of his sister shut helplessly in the temple from which he had got free. He stood irresolute, unable to think. Then he realized that Nancy's safety depended upon him. But there was no vigorous response of energy because he knew, if he ran the whole distance home, Nancy might be ravished and murdered or carried far into the mountains before he could bring help. To go or to stay, the question daunted his powers of decision. But he felt, after a mental debate which seemed to protract minutes to hours, that he must know something more of what was threatening Nancy.

Warily he grasped his bow and tiptoed through the trees toward the monastery. He listened like a scout for every sound. The crackle of twigs beneath his own feet set his heart beating. He came at last to a place where he could survey the front of the temple. The gates were shut. Birds screeched in the trees above him but not a murmur issued from the building.

Edward was perplexed. The silence frightened him. He went cautiously round to the side. In this direction must lie the room into which he had seen Nancy disappear. But the temple was like a fortress; its tall vacant walls mocked scrutiny. There were a few windows at the back, but too high to be reached without a ladder. He dared not come close enough to stand beneath them and call for Nancy. There were the trees, however, and they suggested the expedient of climbing, a feat for which the boy was thoroughly adept. He scaled a smaller pine and swung himself, despite the entangling encumbrance of his bow and quiver, into one of the lower branches of a gigantic silver-barked tree which he realized, with a thrill of joy, must overlook the courtyards of the temple. Higher and higher he climbed, happy to be active; the strong boughs were like steps. But when he got far above the ground and could look down upon the walled buildings he saw nothing that could tell him what had become of Nancy. The courtyards were empty. They had the vacant look of a deserted place.

Perhaps the monks had run away, he thought; perhaps they had carried Nancy with them. They had not intended him to escape, that was certain. Their plans had been so sure that Edward hoped the accident of his slipping free from the trap, the knowledge that he would expose their knavery and was summoning help, might have driven the frustrated monks into flight. Edward decided on greater risks. He climbed back to the earth and walked softly across the open space till he stood beneath the first window.

"Nancy," he called carefully.

There was no answer.

He called again. Still no answer. The white paper which filled the tiny square panes gave blank response to his whispered cries.

He moved on to the second window and repeated his call. Just as he was on the point of trying the next, he heard a faint "Yes." He could hardly control himself for joy.

"Is that you, Nancy?" he whispered in English.

"Yes."

"This is Edward. I got away. Are you all right?"

"Yes."

"Can you get out?"

"No, the windows are too high. I haven't anything to stand on."

"Where are they?"

"I don't know."

"Have they tried to get in?"

"No, they haven't made a sound for a long time. And, besides, I've locked myself in."

"I think they've run away. Don't be afraid, Nancy. I'll get you out. Shout if you hear them."

Edward scarcely could contain his feelings of relief.

Returning to the cover of the trees, he stepped slowly round to the back. There he stopped. The little back gate of the temple was open. He must have guessed correctly: the monks had fled. The boy would have thrown caution to the winds and rushed to the door if some whispering sense of discretion had not restrained his movements, causing him to turn in bare time to see a gray cloak withdrawn behind a neighboring tree. Edward stopped still in alarm, then he gave a shriek of fright and took swiftly to his heels as the monk abandoned his futile ambush and came thundering in pursuit. The other monk emerged from the door within which he had been hiding and joined in the chase.

Edward ran as he had never run before, throwing away his bow in his haste and tearing madly past the front gate of the monastery. The men behind him were fast. He dared not turn his head to see if they were gaining, but he knew this time they were staking all on his capture. They must catch him and close this one mouth which could babble their secret. They were desperate men; if Edward's powers of endurance were trebled by fear, their own fleetness of foot was enhanced not only by the sense that Nancy was the prize of their victory, but also that the loss of the monastery where they had lived might be the price of defeat.

But the race was never run to its finish. Before he was aware of approaching them, Edward, scampering madly, head-down, had crashed between the burly figures of two men. Cold with dismay, certain that he had been intercepted, he was trying to shake himself free from the hand which detained him when he heard a voice exclaim in English:—

"Slowly, slowly, my lad! What's all this about?"

For the first time he looked up to see with amazement that he was not in the hands of ill-met friends of the two monks, but held by the very two foreigners who once had applauded his cricket; he was a captive of the Western barbarians whom, in his mock wars, he had been defying—and very happy to be their captive after the real warfare of this unlucky afternoon.

"My sister!" he cried. "They have got her up there."

He pointed to the monks, who had stopped, evidently chagrined by this new turn of affairs.

"Where?" said one of the men, who had a vivid memory of Nancy's beauty.

"In the temple," said Edward breathlessly; "they want to make her their slave."

The men chuckled, despite themselves, at Edward's earnestness.

"They look like a harmless old pair," said the second. "I shouldn't accuse them of being so naughty."

He approached the two monks and tried to address them in none too fluent Chinese. But the yellow-toothed priest, who had picked up pidgin English in a temple at Peking where the increase of tourists made it both profitable and necessary for him to express his importunity in terms his visitors understood, now interrupted the foreigner.

"Him b'long plenty bad boy," he said, pointing an accusing finger at Edward; "his sister plenty bad girl. Drink much tea, no pay money. So lock up, wanchee make pay money."

The foreigner smiled to see Edward's blank look at hearing this unfamiliar idiom.

"You availed yourself of this gentleman's hospitality, my young sir, without making due recompense, and he has gone to the extreme length, rather too extreme I admit, of locking up your sister. Am I stating the case correctly?"

The boy looked even more amazed. This was a tongue far beyond the bounds of his comprehension. The man laughed again.

"Well, never mind, I don't think there's anything worse than a twenty-cent piece at stake. Follow me and we'll soon have your sister out of the dragon's clutches."

Edward divined that his intentions were helpful. He himself was too fully charged with emotion to take up the task of explaining their adventures in English. He was content to walk quietly between his two new friends, glad of their protection, even ready for the moment to overlook the impudent defense of the priest. The other monk had slipped away during their colloquy and had made good use of the few minutes thus gained, for the little party, when they arrived, found the front gate opened and their host prepared with a kettle to pour out more tea for his visitors.

"No, we must release the beleaguered damsel first," said the Englishman. "Where is she?"

The older monk, understanding his gestures, led the way to the door behind which Nancy was confined. It had been unbolted too and plausibly confirmed the monk's tale.

"He much frightened. No come out."

The man felt the door which Nancy was still keeping securely fastened.

"Ah, she doesn't trust you ecclesiastical gentry," he said. "Call her, my lad; tell her she's safe."

"Nancy," shouted Edward in Chinese, "it's all right now! You can open the door. There are two big foreigners here. The old turnip doesn't dare hurt us."

The monk gave Edward a wicked look. The boy rejoiced to see that his thrust had gone home and referred to the priest in several other terms of choice abuse, a partial revenge which his enemy had no means of countering. The Englishmen stood innocently by, unconscious of how Edward was settling scores with the monk, till at last the grating of bars told them that the prisoner was reassured. The door opened and Nancy stood before them, white and startled.

CHAPTER IX

Neither man forgot this picture of Nancy in the doorway. The quick look of surprise she gave them was not swift enough to banish traces of the terror she had been suffering, so that they cherished a continuing memory of the color in her startled eyes before she looked down, confused by the gaze of two strangers. And her blush of embarrassment was too slow to hide the glowing whiteness of her skin, a whiteness accentuated by the sumptuous disorder of dark hair. The girl kept a nervous grip upon the panels of the door; she stood tiptoe, her body poised for flight; the narrow slope of her shoulders, the fullness of her thighs, the slender ankles, to which the simple costume of jacket and trousers did admirable justice, suggested a figure graceful rather than dainty, a healthy coherence of nerves and muscles ready to express with full pliability the lightest promptings of her mind. She was a creature through whose veins life ran bravely.

Not till Edward took his sister affectionately by the hand did she relax. One of the men, at least, watching the haunted look slowly subside from her face, realized that the boy's story, after all, had not been so wildly unlikely: there had been more at issue than payment for a cup of tea. His suspicion would have been amply confirmed if he had seen the greediness in the face of the monk, a stare of thwarted exasperation which a lifetime of copying the placid Lord Buddha did nothing to erase. Nancy saw it and turned away.

"Well, tea has been your undoing, my children," said the more whimsical of the two Englishmen, "now let tea make amends. Sit down and let's drain the pot. I've got twenty cents for your ransom and twenty cents more for ours, so have no fear. They can hardly lock up the four of us."

Nancy would not think of drinking more tea beneath this hostile roof, but Edward, quite at ease again, poured several cupfuls down his thirsty throat. The two monks were bland and smiling and did their amiable share in a disjointed, bilingual conversation with the two strangers. The children they ignored, but Nancy stiffened each time they passed her stool and waited anxiously for her rescuers to finish. At last, after one of the Englishmen had done the rounds of the temple, examined the eighteen Lo-han, photographed Kuan-yin on her dolphin, and tried various expedients, all useless, to photograph the mummy in his glass case, they got up to go. With effusive bowing they passed out of the monastery from which, an hour ago, she had nearly lost hope of escaping. Her happiness to be away from its walls made her forget for a moment how low the sun had fallen.

"We haven't introduced ourselves," said the man who had been taking the lead. "My name is Beresford and my silent friend here does honor to the good old name of Nasmith. May we presume to ask what you are called?"

"Edward," answered the boy; "Edward and Nancy."

"Good names, too, good old-country names; but have you not a surname, a last name?"

It took Edward a minute to realize that the man meant what would be, in the Chinese order, his first name.

"Yes, it is Hai."

"Hai?" repeated the man. "But that's Chinese. What is it in English?"

Edward did not know. "Hai" always had sufficed.

"We can't call you Miss Hai and Master Hai," laughed Beresford; "that would be absurd. If you will forgive the impertinence, we must content ourselves with Nancy and Edward. What is your father? Why does he dress you like this? Is he a missionary?"

"I don't know," said Edward. "He is an official of the Emperor, that is, he was an official of the Emperor—"

"When there was an Emperor," helped out Nasmith, relieving the boy from possible difficulties with his syntax.

"But your father is an Englishman," said Beresford, mindful of the stony British stare.

"No, he is a Chinese official," protested Edward. "He used to be an Englishman."

The men exchanged curious looks.

"And your mother?"

"Our mother was English. She's dead."

"Oh," said the man, fearful lest he had touched a sore spot, but ready to proceed with his questions when he saw by the slight boastfulness in Edward's bearing that the death of his mother was a claim to distinction rather than a recent sorrow. "Then whom do you live with?"

"Oh, we live with father and the amah and Kuei-lien—that's my father's newest wife; she's very pretty. That's all there are here. The rest are in Peking, the t'ai-t'ai and the other wives. Then I have some brothers and sisters in Peking too, but not real sisters like Nancy."

The two strangers heard this domestic record with astonishment, not the smallest cause of which was Edward's matter-of-fact tone in the telling. They had come leisurely through the silver pines to the end of the temple path. Suddenly Nancy, who had taken no part in the conversation but walked on Edward's far side, began speaking to her brother in swift low Chinese. The reaction from her peril, the novelty of walking with two foreign men, neither of them could blind her to the lateness of the hour. Once out from the shadow of the trees, she realized night would fall long before she and Edward could get home. Another spell of panic unnerved her. Edward himself looked round with an expression of blank dismay.

Nasmith perceived the trouble.

"Where do you live? Near where we saw you playing cricket?"

"Farther, much farther."

The man whistled.

"You couldn't get halfway there before dark, even if you know these goat tracks, which I don't believe you do, do you?"

"No," admitted the boy.

"Neither do we. We might wander all night. We certainly should not think of your going alone. I'll tell you what you can do: you come home with us for the night. We're quite respectable; don't be alarmed. My married sister is there with her children, quite large kiddies, your own age in fact. She can squeeze you in, I know, and then to-morrow morning we shall make it our first duty to see you home."

"But father will not know where we are," said Nancy doubtfully. "He will be angry."

"He will be worse than angry if you are lost, Miss Nancy, and I see no hope of our finding the way there at this time of day. At home, perhaps, I can find a messenger who can take a letter to him. That will keep him from worrying."

Edward seemed eager to accept the invitation, but Nancy still hesitated.

"Don't fear, Nancy," said Beresford kindly, divining her fears; "in any case we are not going to desert you. If you say the word, we'll try to get you home to-night, though I don't think it can be done. If you come home with us I can assure you of a merry time. Mr. Nasmith's sister's children—excuse the mouthful—are really very jolly and full of fun. You mustn't judge them by their uncle. You will have the time of your life, and nothing will please them better than to have two visitors. They'll want every last word of your adventure. What do you say?"

Nancy saw the reasonableness of what he said and she liked the jovial courtesy of the choice he allowed. She was shyer than Edward, but already she felt as if she had known these men—she did not think of them as young men; they represented no special age to her mind—she felt as if she had known them for years. And she trusted them. So to Edward's manifest joy she put aside qualms about her father's wrath and chose an experience which promised entry into a new world, a world she had long been curious to see. She was tired too and hungry, and this walk, as it proved, was none too short for the hour of daylight which remained.

Beresford had extracted a fair knowledge of Edward's history by the time they reached the settlement. He had learned to suppress his amazement and relished with appreciation every sidelight of Edward's intimate recital. It was rare amusement to hear a youngster, who was so assuredly English as to regret the loss of his bow more than all the excitement of a crowded afternoon, treating of concubines, their favor and loss of favor with his father, their expectations of further offspring, as though these were the normal stuff of life. Nasmith did not say much, but he listened with silent appreciation while Nancy walked quietly, obsessed by thoughts no one could read.

They came at last down a wide road into the settlement. Dusk had fallen. The children were dazzled by the many lights which shone from the bungalows and from the occupied temples scattered round the sides of the valley.

"Well, here we are," said Beresford, passing through a grove of acacia at the end of which stood a low, rangy house, built in foreign style. An oil lamp, hanging from the ceiling of the verandah, shone upon a table where dinner, it seemed, was soon to be served. Servants were spreading a white cloth. Nancy, with a sinking of the heart, recognized that several people—they looked like a crowd to her frightened eyes—were sitting in a group just beyond the outer margin of the light.

"So you're back, are you?" came a woman's voice. "We were just going to have dinner without you. Why, whom have you brought here?"

"Sorry to be late," laughed Beresford, as he stepped up to the verandah, "we've found the Babes in the Wood and brought them home with us. Nothing to be afraid of, Edward, Nancy," he said, pushing the children into the light, "she won't bite. Miss Hai, Master Hai, in other words, Nancy and Edward, I have the pleasure of presenting you to Mrs. Ferris. Tell the rest of the family to sit down; I'm not going to introduce them now. This isn't a reception. Take this pair inside, Agnes, and let them wash. Ronald will explain."

Mrs. Ferris was not so puzzled as to miss the hint. She saw the embarrassment of the two children; her motherly sympathies helped her to take instant pity on their plight. She got them inside, called for hot water, soap, and towels, and left the boy and girl vigorously scrubbing themselves.

"They know how to wash," she said delightedly, coming back to the large living-room. "Who are they? What are they?"

Nasmith detailed all that he had learned while Beresford was supplying the curiosity of the group on the verandah and keeping them from too quick a descent upon Edward and Nancy.

"The poor dears!" exclaimed Mrs. Ferris. "How utterly horrible to think of two English children being brought up like that! And with such a man for their father. I declare I don't think you ought to take them back."

"They don't see the horror of it at all, you can count on that, Agnes," said Nasmith, not wishing to smile too openly at his sister's point of view. "They won't find it half so horrible as wrestling with forks and knives at dinner to-night."

"I can borrow some chopsticks from the servants."

"Oh no, the experience will be a thrilling one for them to remember. This will be their first introduction to foreign ways. The more highly colored the impression the better they will like it."

Nancy and Edward were called into consultation for the dispatch of a messenger to their father; then they were ushered into the room, where they stood shyly, not daring to take note of their surroundings.

"You must make yourselves at home," said Mrs. Ferris gently. "I am awfully glad my brother brought you here. We'll take good care of you and see that you get back to your father safely. I'll call the children now; they are dying to meet you."

Nancy had only time enough to notice her pleasant face and the oddness of her light wavy hair—it seemed rather untidy to the Chinese taste in the way it was heaped on top of her head—before the children trooped in. She did not wish to stare too curiously, but her interest in seeing Western girls for the first time directed her eyes with irresistible fascination toward the newcomers.

"These are the twins, Helen and Elizabeth," said Mrs. Ferris, as two girls of Nancy's own height came forward. Each of them stretched out her hand, momentarily puzzling Nancy, who had forgotten that this was the foreign way of greeting. She tried to make up for her lapse by hastily putting out her left hand, so that her new friends in their turn were nonplused till frank laughter on all sides set matters right and helped Nancy to feel more at ease.

The girls saved Edward from accident by merely bowing.

"This is David," continued the mother, introducing a boy of twelve, who grasped Nancy's hand warmly before she had time to be perplexed.

"And this is Patricia."

A bare-legged girl of ten came forward.

"And last but not least—are you, my darling?—Reggie, the baby."

He was a chubby youngster of six.

"So you see we're not a small family, nor a quiet one, either. How old are you, Nancy? You must be about the same age as the twins."

"I am seventeen," Nancy answered, finding it difficult to speak English before so many strangers.

"Seventeen! I should not have thought it. I suppose it's your costume which makes you seem younger. Why, you look almost like a boy. Then you are older than my girls." Mrs. Ferris did not know that Nancy was figuring her age by the Chinese reckoning, which makes a child one when it is born and two on the succeeding New Year's Day, so that a baby born on New Year's Eve can be two years old before he has lived two days.

Older though she might be, Nancy felt very young beside these two strapping lasses, who were so instantly friendly that she was no longer afraid to look at them. For twins their features were not much alike, but they had the same yellowish golden hair, which they allowed to fall profusely down their shoulders. Nancy had never seen this fashion before; it was strange, but she liked it. The color too was unusual, but not too freakish in Nancy's eyes, for she was used to her father's shock of light hair. The blue eyes did startle her, but the girl was more entertained by the dresses they were wearing, dainty white muslin which left throat and shoulders bare and spread out into many embroidered flounces at the knees. This was the foreign style, no doubt, but it did not appear quite modest.

Dinner offered formidable difficulties of its own. Nasmith secretly had prompted the family to talk and laugh in their usual manner so that their guests might not suffer too self-consciously from the ordeal. The hint was well taken, but Nancy and Edward could not wholly escape the interested surveillance of their neighbors. They were proud children, furtively careful how they dealt with knives and forks, not willing to disgrace the family name by even pardonable mistakes. But Edward fared better than his sister. He had been put at the right of Mrs. Ferris, with whom he was soon on easy terms in his eager boyish way, and he benefited by the little mannerly explanations of his hostess, words so delicately put that he did not know he was being instructed and enabled to relish the unfamiliar dishes.

The experiment of putting Nancy on Nasmith's right proved unfortunate. The girl could not accustom herself to sitting next to a man; it was too great a breach with the past. And even her hunger could not override the peculiar flavor of the food. She tried courageously to sip three spoonfuls of tomato soup; the taste balked her. She was more conservative than Edward. She held her knife stiffly and sawed ineffectually at the meat, just checking a potato from leaping with a shower of gravy on to the spotless cloth. With the Chinese aversion to uncooked greens, she rejected the salad, after one nibble; it made her ill to see the yellow oil which the others poured over their lettuce. But the crowning disaster came with the ice cream which the girl, unsuspecting its coldness, put into her mouth and then had no way to extract. The ice cream got behind her teeth, giving her for a moment almost unendurable agony. She lost the distinction between hot and cold, frightened by the thought that her mouth was burning. Almost on the verge of fainting, she could not hide her distress.

The impish Patricia giggled and an awkward titter of amusement went round the table as Nancy, having at last succeeded in swallowing the nauseous stuff, choked like a swimmer who has filled his mouth with salt water.

"It isn't fair," said Nasmith in a comforting voice; "you ought to have your revenge and see us eating Chinese food."

"Do you always eat Chinese food?" inquired Patricia incredulously. "Don't you ever get tired of it?"

"What a question from Pat, of all people," said Elizabeth, "Pat, who's never been known to get tired of eating any food."

Patricia gulped at the bait indignantly, but the situation was saved for Nancy. In the good-tempered wrangling which ensued she could lay down her spoon unobserved and wait calmly for the meal to end. She soon found herself enjoying the retorts bandied back and forth by the Ferris children. The wordy battle reminded her of the three-cornered warfare between Li-an, Edward, and herself. She began to feel immensely at home and rose from the table quite in a mood to learn the games her new friends wished to teach her. She enjoyed draughts and dominoes and smiled at Beresford's droll stories. Nothing, however, quite surpassed the effect of the gramophone, which she listened to as she swung with Elizabeth and Helen in a capacious hammock under the trees. She had heard of these marvelous instruments but Herrick, who hated them, would not permit one within the walls of his home. Amid their host of new impressions the girl and her brother equally could spare wonder for these black discs which sang with such unbelievably human tones. They pictured enviously the sensation they could make by introducing this miraculous toy into the gossiping perfunctory life of the courtyards at home.

So full was the evening, so engaged were Nancy and Edward by their new friends, that Mrs. Ferris had not the heart to call "Bedtime" till every record had been heard; she even let Elizabeth and Helen perform their respective show-pieces on the piano and combine forces for a militant duet, and at last suggested sleep only when Patricia and David's rendering of "Turkey in the Straw" promised to continue interminably and without variation through the night.

She had dug up pyjamas for Edward and a nightgown for Nancy, and now put the boy in charge of David while the twins carried off Nancy like a prize to their own room, offering one bed to their guest and preparing to share the other.

Nancy looked with speechless amazement round the clean white room. Its daintiness, its comfort, were beyond her experience. She gazed at the spotless beds and at the long mirror of the dressing table, and at the bottles, hairbrushes, combs, and hairpin trays arrayed before it. Helen and Elizabeth were delighted by her surprise, overjoyed to explain the uses of every toilet implement. In their turn they wished to be satisfied about every detail of Nancy's clothes, so the three were soon busy comparing the odd features of Western and Chinese garments.

Dressing, Nancy decided, must be an elaborate process in the West. She watched Helen and Elizabeth disrobe with the attention she would have given to a play—with more attention, indeed, for she was privileged to test the fabrics with her sensitive fingers, rubbing her hands up and down their white silk stockings, examining the embroidery which it seemed so strange to her they should conceal on their underwear, looking minutely at the lace straps over their shoulders, the pink ribbons which held up their chemises, the elastic girdles from which their garters were hung.

Nancy was bewildered by such a complexity of garb. She was ashamed to be dressed so simply, to have nothing startling to disclose, just jacket and trousers, singlet and drawers, and then the diamond-shaped piece of cloth fastened by strings across the front of her body as a guard against cholera. There were no ribbons, no lace, no embroidery, not even the gay sash she wore in the privacy of the garden at home when she could rid herself of her outer garments, nothing but severely cut, practical things of plain cotton cloth, with just one touch of color in the orange garters, the dividing line between her sober black stockings and the white skin above. Yet the two girls envied her and sighed to exchange their frills for the convenience of her Chinese clothing.

"We are not dressed up like this usually," explained Helen, "only for dinner. We wear gingham in the day-time, but we still have the skirts to pull down and the stockings eternally to pull up, and we never could get ready in twice the time it takes you."

The upshot of these whispered comparisons was, of course, a desire to exchange clothes and to pose before the mirror in the borrowed delights of exotic garb. Nancy accepted the plan joyfully and watched each stage of her masquerade, while Elizabeth and Helen nimbly tied her in till she was a replica of themselves. She gazed at herself in surprise when the process was done, when her hair had been unbound and loosely gathered into the circle of a satin bow, for she had stepped completely over from the East to the West and thrown away every vestige of her Chinese upbringing. She had the indefinable marks of beauty, her way of holding her head and shoulders, the slim easiness of limbs and body, the youthful melancholy expressed by the dark color of her eyes, marks which promised great loveliness for the future. Helen and Elizabeth candidly recognized the authority with which the filmy frock and long white stockings became the black-haired girl on whom they had been put.

"You are a beauty, Nancy!" exclaimed Elizabeth. "The dress seems to belong to you more than it does to me."

She suggested quite truly the difference between her own prettiness of feature, her own healthy robustness of figure, attractive because they were the qualities so well suited to a romp of sixteen summers, yet qualities on which the frock had been imposed with the obviously self-conscious elegance of a party dress, and the charming seriousness of Nancy's manner, to which all garments, mean and splendid alike, paid their toll.

There was a symbolism in Nancy's appearance, a secret betrayed by her sad smile, and spectators more imaginative than Helen or Elizabeth might have pictured the spirit of her mother close at hand, longing with sombre eyes to see her daughter restored to the country she had lost.

CHAPTER X

Edward and David were having their own good time together. They were not troubling much about distinctions in clothes, once Edward had solved the mystery of how to wear pyjamas, but they were trying to compress every incident of the twelve and thirteen years of their lives into the few hours given them to talk. David, like his older sisters, had come to China too late to pick up Chinese from a nurse and had been sent to a school where conversation in Chinese was discouraged, for fear of the undesirable things the pupils might learn, so China, except in a superficial way, was undiscovered territory. He could not keep out of his speech the arrogance which foreign children assumed toward native life.

"Do you mean to say you live all the time with nothing but Chinese?" he asked. "Don't you ever have anybody to play with?"

"Why, of course, I have lots of people to play with; our family is bigger than yours."

"But only Chinese. That can't be much fun. What do you do? How do you pass the time?"

"Oh, we're always busy. We make poems and draw pictures."

"For play?" David interrupted incredulously.

"Yes, it's lots of fun."

David could not hide his contempt.

"I don't see any fun there. The boys would laugh at me if I wrote poems. They'd call me a 'softy.' We leave things like that to the girls. Don't you play any games, any real games, I mean?"

"Yes, we play chess—"

"Chess, you play chess?"

"Nancy and I are always playing it."

"Pooh, that's an old man's game. It takes a year to make a move. Do you play cricket?"

"Oh, yes, I play cricket," said Edward, relying too confidently on the limited instruction from his father.

At last they had come to a subject David could appreciate. He pounced on Edward for details as to the positions he played, whether he bowled and how he bowled, what was his average as a batsman, who were his team, questions Edward answered so vaguely as to appear, in David's eyes, as anything but skillful fraud. Still he must make allowances for Edward's lamentable training.

"Your idea of cricket isn't what we call cricket," he said magnanimously, and he bewildered his guest to some lengths by his highly technical exposition of the game. "Where do you go to school?" he asked, after this tedious diversion.

"We have school at home."

"Oh—what form are you in?"

Edward did not know what he meant.

"Where have you got to in arithmetic?" explained David, trying to gauge Edward's progress by his own. "Can you do compound interest? I can, and we've finished South America in geography,—take up Africa next term,—and in Latin we're on the fifth declension. You've begun Latin, haven't you?"

Edward had to confess that these were beyond his range.

"All my work's in Chinese except the English lessons father gives us. We have read the Four Books—"

"The Four Books?" exclaimed David, seizing the first tangible clue to Edward's education. "What are the Four Books? Are they readers?"

Edward was speechless. He could not cope with a mind which had never heard of the Four Books. Yet he could not make capital of his own superior knowledge, as David had been doing, because there was a haughtiness in the latter's manner which made him feel that acquaintance with the Four Books was a thing to be ashamed of.

In the same overbearing way David explored every nook of Edward's life.

"Your father is English, isn't he?" he asked.

"He was English," admitted Edward, too subdued by now to resent the question.

"But why does he live like a Chinese? Why doesn't he live like an Englishman?"

"I don't know," answered Edward, never really conscious before to-night that his mode of living was abnormal. "I suppose he likes it better."

"I know," said David. "It's so that he can have all those wives. In England that wouldn't be allowed."

"Wouldn't it? Why not?"

"No, he would have to go to prison if he did that. We can only have one wife."

"But don't the rich people have several wives?"

"No, everybody's just the same. And one wife's enough anyway."

Edward mused on a society so curious that rich and poor should be just the same.

"Well, I'm going to have lots of wives," he said, with his first show of defiance, "and I'm going to have fifty children."

David's jaw dropped. He felt it useless to argue against an ambition so monstrous.

"Mother will give us the dickens if we don't go to sleep," he said, and blew out the lamp.

The family rose early. The slight estrangement between the two boys had been composed by Edward's tales of the Tatar hunting park; in the congenial topic of leopards the boys found mutual interest and Edward restored himself in David's eyes by describing his bow and his feats of archery.

From the first daylight the girls had resumed talking. They put their questions more discreetly, being of a better age to appreciate Nancy's history. But they were more curious than their brother about the domestic intricacies of Timothy Herrick's life and on the glamorous subject of concubines relished every detail they could extract from Nancy's willing lips. The guest was amused at the importance they attached to such commonplace matters.

"But what will you do?" came at last the inevitable question. "Surely you won't marry a Chinese."

"I don't know," said Nancy; "my father hasn't decided. I'm not engaged yet."

"Your father!" the two girls shouted in concert; "are you going to let your father decide?"

"Yes, certainly," replied Nancy, looking at them in surprise, "who else should decide?"

"But suppose he wants you to marry a Chinese?"

Nancy saw nothing extraordinary in this.

"I have to marry the man my father chooses."

"Well, I think it's shameful," protested Elizabeth. "You are too pretty, Nancy, to be thrown away like that. You ought to choose your own husband. Suppose he should have some more wives; would you like that?"

"No," Nancy admitted.

"Could you stop him from having more wives?"

"No."

"Do you want to marry a Chinese?"

"No," said Nancy for the third time, "I don't want to marry anyone. I want to be a nun."

This was a greater blow than anything she had said.

"A nun?" echoed Elizabeth in dismay, "a Catholic nun?"

Nancy did not know what she meant by a Catholic nun. Surely there was only one kind of nun.

"I want to be a nun and live in a temple far away in the mountains," she said.

"You mean a Buddhist nun? You want to live in a temple and worship those ugly idols?"

David had not been more astounded by Edward's wish to have fifty children, while Nancy realized, seeing the amazed faces of her friends, that here lurked between West and East some quicksands of misunderstanding such as with the best will in the world they could not cross. Her desire to be a nun was too slightly defined to be defended in competent speech.

Helen and Elizabeth recognized her difficulty. They were fearful of trespassing on courtesy and did not push their indignation more outspokenly—it was safer to turn for diversion to the mechanical incidents of getting dressed, Nancy's tub-bath, her initiation into the use of a sponge, the manicuring of her nails—but the girl had become in their eyes a tragic heroine whom they were impulsively determined to save.

Mrs. Ferris shared the concern of her daughters and looked compassionately at the two children, whom she felt she had no right to send back to such a travesty of a home. She confided her indignation to Nasmith, thought something ought to be done: it was shameful condemning such a nice, well-behaved boy, such a pretty, really beautiful girl, to live with that immoral old man. He must have kidnapped them; they surely could not be his children—and their mother dead too! How she would have suffered if she had known! Wasn't there a law to prevent such a disgrace? Ronald ought to inquire of the British legation and get Edward and Nancy into safe hands before they were utterly ruined.

But the early breakfast had been finished. There was no excuse for delay. The sorrow of parting was eased by the decision of the twins that they must escort Nancy home and David's prompt statement that he would do the same duty by Edward. The impressionable Patricia was convinced only with difficulty that the road was too long; she wept as though she were parting from lifelong friends. To the inexpressible astonishment of Edward and Nancy, Mrs. Ferris gathered each of them into her motherly arms and kissed them. Would they all expect to do this, Nancy asked herself? Why did nice people have such barbarous customs? She might kiss Helen and Elizabeth, if she saw they were disappointed, but she never could kiss Mr. Beresford and Mr. Nasmith. The prospect called up bitter memories and turned her thoughts in fear to contemplating the anger which her father would visit upon their truancy.

The walk, begun with the care-free abandon of a picnic, grew more and more depressing, despite the merry companionship of the girls, Beresford's comic remarks, and Nasmith's quiet understanding reserve, in which Nancy put more trust than she knew. Nancy endeavored to give in a light-hearted vein the promises the twins were trying to exact, that she should come and see them again, that they might call upon her, that they should do long walks together and write many letters.

"Yes," agreed Nancy, "if my father will let me."

She put so much inflection upon this conditional clause that the girls knew by instinct she was withholding more than she offered.

"You mean he might not let you?" exclaimed Helen tragically.

"Perhaps," Nancy confessed. "I don't know. He does not like us to go out."

"We're going to see you anyway, no matter what he says," was Elizabeth's indignant rejoinder.

Nancy smiled. She hoped they might, but she dared not encourage them. She would not let them even climb the final path to her home.

"My father doesn't see many people," she explained. "He might not like it; and if he got angry he would take us back to Peking."

Nasmith saw her point and insisted that his nieces and nephew wait while he and Beresford accompanied their guests to the house. Nancy wanted to leave all of them there, but the two men evinced a complete determination not to forsake the children one step short of their home door so she did not waste time in futile dissuasion. She did not escape from the twins, however, without embraces and kisses, a strange affectionate demonstration she schooled herself to endure, but she was glad to notice that Elizabeth and Helen made no such advances toward Edward. Plainly there were limits to the custom.

Long before the returning prodigals had reached the door, they were seen. The nurse came hobbling out to meet them and overwhelmed her foster children with tears and affectionate exclamations, making them appreciate guiltily the panic their absence had produced.

"Your father," cried the amah, "ai ya, he was like a madman! Every one of us he had out searching, even me with my poor feet; and he would not rest; he sent us out again and again and he himself walked tens of li before your messenger came and eased our hearts. Eh, we were glad! But that was late at night. I cannot tell you how we suffered before that man came. Your father wanted to give him five dollars. But that was not wise; it was too much. I paid him a thousand cash and he was very happy."

The amah scarcely noticed Nasmith and Beresford at first, so torrential was the greeting poured upon her two children. But when the party had reached the door and were under the smiling eyes of the servants, she grew calmer. A flutter of old remembered occasions restored her dignity at the welcome sight of these foreigners. Perhaps here was a husband for Nancy. The foreign gentlemen must come in and have tea and cakes; those were the Great Man's orders.

They were not the Great Man's orders, but the amah knew what was necessary to the moment and she was determined the Western gentlemen who had brought back her treasures should not depart with poor memories of the Herrick hospitality. So she seated them formally in the guestroom, hurried Nancy and Edward to their rooms where Kuei-lien was waiting excitedly to question them; and then informed the father of his guests. To her intense relief the Great Man sent a message inviting the two visitors to his own room.

Nasmith and Beresford scarcely could veil their curiosity at sight of the elderly gentleman, wearing Chinese clothes with dignity, who received them in his sunny room above the ravine. Herrick's gravity of bearing showed him at his best in this first interview after so many years with men of his own race. One forgot the sensual chapters of his story and remembered only the scholar, the background of shelves and books seemed so fitting, and the writing materials on his desk, the ink-stone, the brushes, the open volume, the sheaf of bamboo papers, even accessories like the pot of tea and the water pipe belonged to a man who was actively concentrated upon study.

"You will excuse any defects of hospitality," Herrick began, not choosing to remember that he had met these men before. "I have been a long time a stranger to your ways. I understand that you have saved my children from a great danger. It was very good of you. I should not have liked harm to come to these two children of mine—they are nice children," he added, as though speaking to himself. "And I must thank you a great deal for walking so far this morning to bring them safely home and your sister for giving them a place to stay. It was very good, very good."

Despite his composure, Herrick was showing signs of embarrassment. He seemed to be commenting rather sadly upon his own words, repeating his thoughts in a stumbling manner which grew pathetic and stirred the sympathy of the two men who were listening.

Nasmith hurried to relieve the old man—he was looking much older than his years—by disclaiming credit for anything but a fortunate and timely arrival. He extolled the presence of mind Nancy and Edward had shown. As to their staying overnight with his sister, that was too great a pleasure to be thanked for.

"Were they a trouble?" asked the father. "Did they behave well?"

"They were what they clearly have been taught to be—a lady and a gentleman. I should be proud if my nieces and nephew could conduct themselves in a Chinese home as your children conducted themselves in ours."

The father smiled with pleasure.

"They are nice children," he insisted.

Then another thought occurred to him.

"You have nieces and nephews?" he asked. "Did Nancy and Edward meet them?"

Nasmith related at length his observations upon the friendship struck up between his family and their two guests; he saw how wistfully the father relished even the lesser details, nodding here and there at incidents which pleased him, repeatedly jerking out the word, "Good." He wanted to know the names of these nephews and nieces, their ages, their schooling. When he heard that they were waiting in the path below, he would not hear of their going home unwelcomed.

"No," he said, "they must not. It is near noon. They will be hungry. I will send for them—I will send Nancy herself."

The daughter came in some surprise at being summoned before the two men had gone. She remained standing at the door, not presuming of course to scan the face of her father, though she wondered if she were to be scolded before strangers.

"Nancy," said Herrick in English, "you have left three of our guests waiting outside. That is not right. We do not pay our debts in this fashion. You will go down and welcome your friends and bring them to your rooms. And tell amah, as you go, that the cook must prepare nine bowls."

The man meditated with amusement upon the shock his command had given.

"Yes," he said, "she is glad. Her eyes showed it. Ah, my friends, it had to come, it had to come. I could not keep them from making friends with their own people. I am not sorry it happened this way."

Nancy, after she had left the room, could scarcely believe that she had heard aright. To have her escapade condoned in this manner exceeded her wildest hopes. She was still dazed as she repeated her father's instructions to the amah.

"Hai, I knew it, I knew it," cried the old woman joyfully. "He is changing at last. The sight of men of his own race has made him homesick. Soon we shall all go to England, and every afternoon you will wear new dresses and go to garden parties."

Prophecy, on the amah's part, could be as endless as reminiscence. Nancy escaped on the second part of her errand and brought her friends, who were waiting restively, up the steep path to the house. It was her turn to play hostess, and she played the part with unmeasured happiness, not even regretting the lack of gramophone and piano, when she saw how instantly Helen and Elizabeth were absorbed in every curious detail of the house. Particularly were they entranced by Kuei-lien, who welcomed them at her radiant best.

"Is she really a concubine?" asked Elizabeth in awe. "She is such a dear, and prettier than a picture," a compliment well earned by Kuei-lien's unerring skill in the colors she chose to combine, jacket and trousers of a slatish tan piped with magenta brocade.

Back and forth between them Nancy translated flattering remarks. The servants stood gaping. The old nurse ran hither and thither, like a bemuddled hen, cackling interminable yet disjointed recollections to any and all who even seemed to listen. The nine bowls were got at last on to the table, despite the confusion which prevailed, and Nancy was made amends for her awkwardness with knife and fork by the merrily clumsy way her guests wielded chopsticks.

"I believe you arranged this deliberately to have your revenge," said Helen, surveying the havoc they had wreaked on pork balls and bean curd.

Herrick himself came to view this unprecedented party. Nancy, Edward, Kuei-lien, all rose at his entry. The others followed, while the elderly man insisted upon shaking hands with his three visitors.

"Eat, my children," he said; "don't stand any more. It does an old man good to see so many young faces."

"Why do they have to grow up?" he kept repeating, when he had gone back to Nasmith and Beresford. "Why do they have to grow up? Children are the only good thing in this world. Excuse my curiosity. I have learned Chinese ways, you know—you are not married, are you?"

They were not.

"Of course; I forgot. You Englishmen don't marry so young. I suppose you are not thirty? Only twenty-four? Each of you. Ah, that's a promising age—and a difficult age, too. Well, we'd all of us risk the difficulties, would we not?"

His inquiries went further. He extracted their names, told them his own, apologized for having none but Chinese cards to offer in return for their own. So they were teaching in a Government technical school; did they like it? With insinuating persistence he found out their opinions of China. He read them a little homily on the classics, translated lyrics from the glorious T'ang poetry, grew genial and discursive, giving rein to his love of the mountains and trees and falling streams and unfading children, always children,—ah, why could they not take the immortality of the sun they played in?—and he ended before their wondering eyes by writing them each a pair of scrolls in large symmetrical characters, the characters to which he had given thirty years of his life. He translated them:—

"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."

"That has an interpretation," he said, smiling, as he. handed a pair to Nasmith, "but I won't read the legend for you. You must learn to read it for yourself. And this too has its interpretation," he said, before translating Beresford's scroll:—

"Mirth becomes the time of danger;
Sadness suits the time of love."

"Now," he said, "I have puzzled you like the old Delphic oracle,—wasn't it?—but I have written only what I see with my own eyes. If my interpretations do not come true, it will be for one reason: it will be because I am unable to control what shall be written on my own scrolls."

"An extraordinary man," Beresford commented, after good-byes had been said.

"And a most unhappy one," added his friend. "I don't think he will invite us again."

CHAPTER XI

For a long time Herrick sat in quiet, like a figure in meditation. The drowsiness of the afternoon seemed to have pervaded his spirit, the strange stillness now reigning over the house after all the laughter that had gone before. Three or four times the man took up his brushes, tapered the hairs to a slender point, then replaced the brass caps and put back the pens idly into their stand. At last he called for Nancy, made her sit down, and asked her to tell the whole story of yesterday's adventure. The perfidy of the monks angered him.

"I shall raze their temple to its foundations," he exclaimed, "and drive them forth homeless like the wolves they are!" But one knew, in listening to him, these words would never be fulfilled.

He was particular that Nancy should be explicit about all she had done, all she had said, at the home of the Ferrises.

"So they dressed you in foreign clothes," he remarked. "I should like to have seen you; I should like to have known whether my girl is really Chinese. Did you like it? Would you rather wear Western clothes than your own? Shall I have them made for you?"

"Oh no," protested the girl, "they were not comfortable. I like my own clothes better."

"And the food—the taste was not pleasant, eh?"

"I couldn't eat it."

"Naturally. Yet those are small matters."

Nancy paused at last in her tale.

"Have you told me everything?" her father asked searchingly. Nancy could not meet the careful scrutiny of his eyes. "Perhaps not quite all," he suggested. "Western girls have romantic thoughts in their heads. Surely they must have asked some questions about marriage."

"They did," admitted his daughter.

Herrick insisted on every detail of a conversation so vital. Nancy was confused, but she told him everything.

"Our ways do seem shocking to them," he observed. "What did you think of Mrs. Ferris?"

The girl was glowing in the terms she used.

"And the two girls—what were their names, Helen, Elizabeth?—did you find them really congenial?"

Nancy was even more positive.

"You might not like them so well if you saw more of them," argued her father. "Suppose you were asked to live with them for a month, would you enjoy that?"

The proposal was too momentous to be answered offhand.

"Would Edward go too?" asked the girl.

"Oh, don't put too much weight on my words. I am only stating an imaginary case."

"I should be lonely without Edward."

"Pooh, you wouldn't miss Edward; you would have lots of companionship. There are the two men, Mr. Beresford and Mr. Nasmith, they would be like older brothers to you."

"How could I have anything to do with them?" said Nancy, surprised by the seeming indelicacy of her father's statement.

"Ah, you are an innocent child, Nancy, you don't know much about the world. In the West the men and women all live together like that. They don't consider it improper. Perhaps it's a better way than ours. I should like you to see for yourself; your experience has been very, very limited, my child. Were you afraid of these men?"

Nancy did not notice how subtly her father had shifted from innocuous generalities to a very particular question.

"Oh no, I was not afraid of them. They were very kind and helped us so much."

Herrick smiled.

"Yes," he resumed, "they did impress me as quite kind and gentle in their manners, especially Mr. Beresford; he seemed a very clever young man and talked in a most entertaining manner. I am not so sure about the other, what was his name—Mr.—er, Mr.—"

"Nasmith," volunteered Nancy rather overpromptly.

"That's right, Nasmith, Mr. Nasmith. Mr. Nasmith, I thought, was a little stupid; he didn't say much."

Nancy took the bait instantly.

"Oh no, he's not stupid," she averred, "not at all stupid. He is really kinder, more thoughtful, than Mr. Beresford."

"Oh," said Herrick, after a pause, "and since when have daughters known more than their fathers?"

Nancy was properly confounded. Her cheeks grew red with embarrassment, but Herrick's sternness consisted in words alone. He had got the hint he wished and could afford to smile at his own reproof, for the wisdom of a father sometimes compassed facts his daughter had not even guessed, facts she lacked the experience to acknowledge.

Nancy went away much puzzled. She had thought, from some of her father's questions, that he actually intended sending her to visit the Ferrises. In the first lonely reaction to the excitement she had been enjoying, excitement so unexampled in her tranquil life, she wished with all her heart he would let her go so that she might laugh and talk and share her world of new impressions with Elizabeth and Helen. The house still echoed to their voices, the rooms were still haunted by their eager merry faces. Edward was no comfort to her just now. Life had suddenly become drab.

She went to her room, bolted the door, lay face down on the bed and abandoned her overladen heart to a spell of frantic weeping.

Herrick too had done a thing he seldom did: he had gone walking alone. He also felt the depression which pervaded the house. He had got a glimpse of Edward, sitting woebegone in the courtyard, trying, with the half-hearted need of doing something, to fashion a new bow. The sight was too much. Here was another problem forced upon him. He had been thinking so exclusively of Nancy, whose case was so urgent, that he had forgotten poor Edward for the moment, forgotten that his was another difficult future to provide. The man could not sit at home any longer. He had to walk off his mood by stubborn climbing, climbing which did not end till he had scaled the old beacon tower and seated himself heavily in a bastion that overlooked leagues of mountain.

Here he had no choice but to think. He saw only vaguely the lucent glory of the scene, the still evening sunshine, the imperturbable towers of the distance; even the far, far-away golden palace roofs of Peking vexed him because they spoke of the peace he had been seeking these many years whereas his mind had been betrayed into nothing but ugly turmoil.

Herrick pictured the might-have-beens of the past. Suppose he had sent his children home, as he knew he ought to have done when he first discarded his kinship with the West; what would they have been now? Would the benevolence of uncles and aunts have compensated for the loss of their father? Yes, perhaps it might have compensated them; they would have grown up ignorant of the parent whom their elders would refer to in bated, pitying terms as a man gone wrong. It might have compensated them; but how could it have made up to him for the loss of his two children?

He wished he could have seen Nancy in a Western frock as the Ferris girls had clothed her. Then he might have judged for himself whether she was to be preferred to the grave maiden whom the East had trained. By now she would have spent twelve years in the peace of an English garden. She would be making the daily round of her flowers, the primroses and foxgloves and hollyhocks he could fancy her tending, and playing tennis on the cropped lawn, or reading lazily in a basket chair, dreaming of the seaside and dances and picnics. And Edward would be home for the holidays, speaking the amazing idiom of a schoolboy. It was a pleasant picture, Herrick admitted, rather sentimental perhaps, and, except when he was homesick, a little insipid; but the one element of the scene which stuck in his mind was that in this scene he could take no part. He certainly did not wish to be doddering round with a cane or listening to his relatives as they discussed the vicar's Whitsunday sermon and the prospects of the county show or the perennially banal topic of Farmer George's rheumatism. It seemed really a merit not to have condemned Nancy and Edward to this.

No, it was not the past of which Herrick was jealous, but the future, the future which threatened to tear away his children. The father discerned the enmity of fate in the chance that, after his long-maintained watchfulness, suddenly had given Nancy and Edward friends from the West. He hated these friends, hated the attraction which would undo all his careful work, breathing life into the stolid wood-block people of their English readers, restoring to the girl and the boy a living tongue for one he wished them to think of as dead. He was jealous of Helen and Elizabeth, jealous of Mrs. Ferris and Beresford, but above all things jealous of the quiet Nasmith, in whose destiny he perceived some occult link with Nancy's itself.

"I will not give them up," he said vehemently. "After training them all these years, after giving them something better and finer than anything they could have got in England, what a fool I should be to turn them over to the first blond strangers they meet. It would be a waste, nothing more than a waste. Nasmith and the rest of them can hang before I'll let Nancy or Edward see them again. I won't destroy my own work."

Having made this decision, which decided nothing, Herrick gave it immediate effect. He ordered his children for their safety's sake not to go out of the temple enclosure. He said nothing more about Nancy's visiting the Ferrises. He was mastered by the need to forget all these urgent problems. He called for wine, called for his opium pipe, called for Kuei-lien.

She went to him with a happy smile on her face for she had been waiting a long, long time to hear this summons. With the instinctive genius of the wanton she lured the man to new frenzies of love, taunted him, by a modesty artfully affected, into committing new blissful indignities, glamorous outrages, in which her master tried to stifle the soul as well as the body of his slave and succeeded only in stifling his own. Then she sat naked on the floor before his couch, her hair raveled but her eyes cool, and lighted the lamp and heated the first of the little pellets which were to induce days of passionate stupor. He dozed; he dreamed; the sickly smoke filled the room.

Kuei-lien picked up her scattered garments. She was still smiling.

CHAPTER XII

For a full week Herrick lived behind closed doors. It was a long devastating bout, and it was a hatefully dull week for Nancy and Edward. Recent liberty made their present confinement wear all the more heavily. Romantic memories of Elizabeth and Helen and David made the lonely children captious and cross with one another. They had no zest for books; the sun kept eternally shining; it called them away to the mountain tops. Edward fumed because he could get no practice with his newly made bow; Nancy sat on the platform above the ravine, musing as to who should rescue her from her boredom, and more and more she wondered who could rescue her from fear. For fear was beating at the gates of her courage.

In this narrow temple of the Western Hills Herrick's absence weighed like sultry heat upon the atmosphere of the household, quieting the tongue of the amah and the vociferous exchanges of the servants. Kuei-lien came and went with the preoccupation of a nurse waiting upon a sick man. But the fact Nancy saw and the fact she despised was that the preoccupation was a happy one. At last, one day Nancy could stand it no more.

"I want to see my father," she said.

Kuei-lien looked at her with surprise. The sneer on her lips almost faded before the resolute dignity of the girl. For the first time the all-conquering audacity of the concubine was checked; Kuei-lien began to feel misgivings about this stubborn child, misgivings and a little fear, because she could not meet Nancy's obstinacy with her usual effective mockery.

"I want to see my father," the girl repeated.

"But you can't see him," Kuei-lien said. "He is busy. He would call for you if he wished to see you."

"Ask him if I may see him."

"Oh, I can ask him, but I know what his answer will be."

Kuei-lien went away much disturbed.

"I have had the most absurd request from Nancy," she told her master, who was lying heavily on his couch. "She wants to see you. She told me she must see you."

"Very well, tell her to come," said Herrick.

Kuei-lien could not believe the report of her own ears.

"You want her to come?" she asked. "I told her you were too busy to see her."

"What right have you to speak for your master?" the man shouted. "Go and tell her to come."

Kuei-lien had no course but to go.

"You have made a pretty mess of things," she warned Nancy. "Your father is furiously angry at your asking to see him. He said, Yes, you should see him, and ordered me to make you come."

"I am going without being forced," said Nancy with irritating self-possession. "You don't have to make me."

Kuei-lien, balked in her effort to frighten the girl, went ahead of her and opened the door of Herrick's bedroom. The shutters had been thrown wide to let in the late afternoon sun, but there had not been time to clear the mustiness of the place, the lurking odor of the drug, which clung to the bed curtains and to the implements laid ready on a table by Herrick's side.

Nancy evinced not a sign of disgust as she entered the room and stood waiting impassively for her father's first words. Yet she seemed out of place amid the disorder of the chamber, which was littered with signs of Kuei-lien's occupancy.

This was apparent to Herrick himself. Although the situation could not foster any illusion as to how he had been spending his days, the father nevertheless made the effort to greet his daughter with the ceremony proper between them. His orgy had burned itself out, but his face showed the strain of dissipation; his eyes were dull, there were haggard lines round the mouth, pouches of puffy flesh beneath his eyes. Nancy could not avoid glimpses of his unkempt fingers nor of the loose robe bound round his body.

"And what is it so important that you must ask permission to see me?" Herrick inquired, speaking in Chinese.

Nancy had her one sentence prepared. She uttered it in a low cool voice.

"I was afraid to leave my father so long alone with his enemy."

A pause, fraught with deep feeling, ensued upon these daring words.

"Is that all?" Herrick asked finally.

"Yes," admitted the girl, "that is all."

"Very well, you may go."

Nancy turned obediently and went out of the room. Even Kuei-lien had the decency to wait until the child was out of earshot before she gave vent to her mirth.

"Ha, ha, ha!" she laughed. "What a speech! Afraid to leave her father alone with his enemy. Whom does she mean? Does she mean me?"

Her amusement was not very convincing. It seemed forced, bolstered up by weak bravado.

"Yes, she means you," retorted her master, "she means you and she means all this mischievous rubbish."

With a sweep of his hand he brushed the glasses, the opium pipe, the little lamp, from the surface of the table. They fell with a crash to the floor.

"Don't be so wasteful," protested the concubine, more entertained by this flare of temper on Herrick's part than by Nancy's grim sentence. "What a shame to break all these things. You'll need them again."

"Yes, that is the beastly part of it," Herrick acknowledged, "I shall need them again—but not now—not now. And I don't need you either. You may go."

"Your eloquence is not so impressive as your daughter's," said Kuei-lien, as she retreated. Her indomitable capacity for being merry never deserted the girl, even at times of defeat.

Left to himself at last, Herrick began to repair the disorders of the past few days. He shaved, dressed himself neatly, returned to his books and his pens. But throughout the mechanical functions which helped to bring back self-respect, his mind was filled with the vision of Nancy's face, her impassive demeanor, in unreproaching contact with the signs of his own collapse. Again and again he mumbled the girl's words. It was a curiously saving trait in Herrick's character that he did not resent them.

"'Alone with his enemy,'" he kept saying, "How right she was, how just! Ah, but I must take care lest my enemy be her enemy too."

Then on a sudden came a frightening spasm of pain, the first in his life. Always Herrick had been well and robust, seldom ill for two days together; but now he gasped and choked, held his hand to his chest, thinking with ungovernable terror that he was going to die with all the loose strings of his life untied. After minutes that were years, the spell passed. He lay back white-faced in a chair, his forehead pouring sweat. He recognized the warning. His heart was affected. What use would there be in disguising the truth?

Herrick had no intention to consult a physician. Physicians had not saved his wife; they had never been of use to him. He knew the advice they would give: diet, self-control, no excitement. They had no cure for this complaint. Some people lived on for years, others were snuffed out in a night; what was bound to fall fell despite the advice of all the doctors in the world. After the gripping pain had relaxed—there was no room for any state except fear while it lasted—the man even treated the subject jauntily and swore he was as likely as any to round off his threescore and ten. But he could not do it peacefully if he left any room for grief to befall Nancy and Edward.

It was after this attack that Ronald Nasmith received a letter to which with surprise he saw Herrick's signature attached. The note was short, impersonal in its wording; the writer had business of importance he could not discuss on paper; he asked Mr. Nasmith to indulge the infirmities of an older man by paying him a visit; he also must request that his letter and the subject of the visit be treated as confidential.

Nasmith dispatched Beresford as acting-uncle on a picnic to some hot springs while he slipped away to see Herrick. His mind during the past few days had been much occupied with Herrick and the puzzle of the scrolls. He had been studying a riddle which instinct told him was full of personal import, a message that Herrick intended and wished him to decipher. Yet the answer evaded his closest research. It might seem easy to Herrick, schooled in these antithetical couplets by which the Chinese conveyed the many thoughts they did not care to lay bare on the surface; it was not clear to Nasmith, who burrowed through all his dictionaries and went to the length of asking help from his teacher. The dictionaries explained little and the teacher, although he exclaimed at once that the characters were the work of a master, offered explanations so involved that Nasmith, even though he understood less than half of what his teacher said, knew that this excess of commentary was merely the happy Chinese way of concealing ignorance: the teacher was groping for a clue, as Nasmith once before had caught him doing when the drowsy pedagogue had elaborated the most profound moral sentiments from what proved to be simply the Chinese transliteration of the name Australia. In the end, exhaustive study had not told as much as Herrick himself chose to reveal:—

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.

"I wonder if he will have expected me to master his riddle," thought Nasmith, as he set out upon his long walk.

Herrick received his guest in the same room as before. He was regaining the dominance of his nerves but there was, nevertheless, a stiffness of bearing which caused Nasmith to eye his host keenly, anxious for any hint of the business in hand, and to note marks of the upheaval through which the man had been passing. Something was wrong—business cares, worries about property, some trouble in which the man could not turn to Chinese friends for assistance. Perhaps Herrick wanted an executor or a witness to his will. No, that could not be the difficulty; he would have called for Beresford as well.

"I suppose you are mystified as to the reasons for my letter," Herrick began. "Did you read the scroll I wrote for you?"

"I tried to read it," Nasmith admitted.

"And failed. I am not surprised. It was the truth, and the truth is always far-fetched. I have, I am afraid, the Chinese faculty for talking in riddles and as to the inner meaning of those two sentences I prefer not to explain it, for the best part of your life will come when you find out the meaning for yourself—if you do."

"That is putting rather too great a strain on my curiosity, don't you think?"

"Perhaps. But I'm going to offer you the key to the puzzle and you can make the best of it as you choose."

Herrick fingered the lip of his teacup for a minute or two while Nasmith wondered if he had been summoned all this distance merely to hear more of such cryptic nonsense.

"Do you think my wits are wandering?" Herrick asked with disconcerting suddenness.

"I am not sure of it," replied his guest, willing to be as provokingly frank. The older man laughed.

"I have been ill," he said, "but my wits are still here. I have wit enough to recognize an honest man; that is why I have asked you to come."

"Thank you; the compliment is enjoyed, even if it isn't deserved."

"How much patience would you have, to keep talking in this vein?"

"Not much more," Nasmith confessed.

"Ah, you will never become Chinese."

"I don't wish to."

"Good. You are thoroughly English, quite thoroughly English, aren't you? You wouldn't care to follow my example and become Chinese?"

"If you wish me to say what I think, I should say a life like yours was a waste, a shameful waste, not fair to yourself, Mr. Herrick, and especially not fair to your two children."

"You are honest, that is the important point. For your opinions, Mr. Nasmith, I don't care a snap of the finger. Opinions don't have half the influence we imagine. But you have touched the subject I have in mind. It is my children and what is fair to them that I am keeping in mind. I have been ill: without mincing matters I might just as well tell you I have very definite signs of heart trouble. You know what that means. It means that I might drop even while I am talking with you here. That is disquieting. I don't care to leave the future of my children dependent on the whims of this worn-out heart of mine."

"Why do you keep them in China? Why don't you take them home?"

"I have a home here and I am too old to change it, don't wish to change it, in fact. No, I didn't call you for advice, Mr. Nasmith; I am capable of giving myself all the advice you can suggest. If I wished to, I could put Nancy and Edward to school, but I don't wish to. Let's not argue about it, just say I am too selfish, too pig-headed, not willing at my time of life to lose the company of two delightful children. I want something more definite from you, something which will be a real provision for the future and not the making myself and my children miserable by shipping them off to school among strangers and foreigners—"

"You want, then—" interrupted Nasmith, anxious to stem Herrick's garrulous speech.

"I want to betroth my daughter Nancy to you."

CHAPTER XIII

Nasmith did not answer. The proposal was too unexpected to fit into any compartment of his mind. Room had first to be made for it, room provided with hesitation and an agitated heart. Nasmith did not deny that Nancy had occupied much of his thought, more than he openly allowed. He could not shake out of his memory the sight of the girl, poised tiptoe for flight, as she stood between the doors of the temple. He had been haunted by the picture, haunted by a crying sense of wrong in restoring the girl to a dangerous, tragic future. But Herrick's offer was too real. It was stern stuff to be built upon such vague foundations.

"Don't imagine I wanted to bring up this subject," said Herrick. "I don't wish to see Nancy married to you or to anyone else. I would hide her from every last one of you if I had the choice. You haven't got her, I tell you; you haven't got her yet. I may hide her despite you. Ah, if I only had the choice! This stupid heart of mine has taken the choice out of my hands."

"There is no need to be angry with me for weighing your own proposal," Nasmith said. "Your suggestion is no less a shock to me than it seems to be to yourself. But before going into my side of the matter, I think we must consider Nancy's side. Whatever my own inclinations may be—and I must confess they are not very definite—I would not consider your offer for a moment if I thought the arrangement would be distasteful to your daughter. What do you think she would say at being disposed of in this summary manner to a man who is practically a stranger?"

"It's not at all so dreadful as you imagine. Nancy's training all her life has led her to expect no other method of betrothal. Your haphazard Western fashion would seem scandalous to her. A father is more competent to choose a husband for his daughter than the girl herself; he knows the world, she doesn't. No doubt she has her fancies, but if she is betrothed to a man who is not utterly impossible it will not be hard to attach her fancies to the husband chosen for her."

"That may be so; I am not prepared to deny it, though it seems to me, in the main, a heartless business. But what about my share in the contract? I have not been educated to think your Chinese way is normal. Can I attach my fancies to a girl I have hardly known?"

"Is this merely a theoretical question or have you some practical plan in mind? I certainly feel no need to advertise the merits of my daughter. You have seen her and, if you are the man I take you for, you have understood her. Remember this: it was not by throwing dice or tossing a coin that I chose you instead of Beresford. He, I think, would have jumped at my offer—I should suspect anyone who jumped at so unusual an offer as mine."

"No, I am not putting a theoretical question; I have a most practical plan," said Nasmith.

"I know your plan; you want Nancy to live with your sister."

"Yes, and I want more than that. I want her sent to school with my nieces."

"You want me to undo the last twelve years of her training."

"Not at all. I am quite satisfied with her training, but if she is to be a Westerner it has to be given a more definite direction; it cannot continue on Chinese lines. There will not be much shock now; there would be tremendous shock a few years later."

"Yes, I was prepared for all these arguments," said Herrick, "and for a few more as well. By living with your sister, Nancy would come to know you better; you in turn would have a better acquaintance with her. Yes, I know all these arguments. And suppose, after this mutual acquaintance, you found your tastes growing farther and farther apart, what would you do to remedy the situation?"

"Break the engagement."

"No, that's not my notion of a betrothal. That simply transfers Nancy from my care, puts her at the mercy of all the accidents which may occur in your sister's home, possible jealousies or gossip or misunderstanding,—you know the things I mean,—and leaves her with the chance of a broken engagement at the end. Then what would she be fit for? Do you expect her to go out and capture a husband as your Western women do or come back to the Chinese life she has unlearned?"

"At least, it is better," protested Nasmith, "to discover uncongenial tastes before marriage than afterward."

"Not at all. After marriage you have made your bargain. You have no choice but to make your tastes congenial. Have you forgotten your old proverb about necessity? It's when people have the option of being uncongenial that they look for excuses to quarrel just to assert their freedom. If I sent Nancy to you in a red chair to-morrow, I haven't the slightest doubt that she would prove congenial. It would be your duty to see that she did."

"You don't really wish me to marry her now?" demanded Nasmith, somewhat disconcerted, "a girl of seventeen."

"A girl of sixteen," Herrick corrected. "No, indeed I don't wish you to marry her now. I don't wish to surrender her a day before she is twenty, that is, if my heart holds out. If I die, she goes to you at once and Edward with her—he will be suitably provided for. But while I live or until she is twenty Nancy remains with me."

"And you expect me to consent to betrothal on these terms?"

"I do."

"Don't you think it is rather one-sided?"

"It is one-sided," Herrick admitted, "but it appears more one-sided now than it will later. I am asking you to put inordinate trust in the judgment of an old man who has done some thinking about the both of you. I have put twelve years into what you might term an experiment. Nancy is the result, and if you think the result lovable—as I do—you will give some credit to the methods which achieved it. I want just four more years, four more years; the Nancy you see now will not bear comparison with the Nancy I am offering you as a bride. Ah, if my heart had not given out I shouldn't need to be begging you; you would be begging me. Nancy needs no excuses, sir, no apologies, but I—I need four years of security, four years of peace of mind, to complete my work and to keep the love of my children. It is only in your own interests that I am asking you to make a one-sided bargain."

Nasmith was moved by Herrick's earnestness, but he was not convinced. Nasmith paused.

"Then you refuse my terms," he said, at last, after allowing the effect of Herrick's passionate appeal to grow cold, "you will not let Nancy visit my sister, nor go to school with my nieces, not even if I bind myself to marry your daughter."

"I cannot accept such terms even if you bind yourself. I have considered them, Mr. Nasmith, considered them thoroughly, long before I sent for you. They are too great a price for any betrothal. I would rather take chances with my heart."

"Is it fair to take such chances, fair to leave a young girl without protection?" Nasmith was angry in his deliberate way. "What other alternative have you, if I refuse?"

Herrick smiled. He had his trump card to play.

"I have the alternative I have entertained from the beginning—until I met you, in fact, and thought I had found a man large-minded enough, generous enough to make it unnecessary. I have the alternative of marrying Nancy to a Chinese."

"You are trying to threaten me now," said Nasmith. "You chose the wrong man. I will not be threatened into betrothing myself to your daughter."

"Don't decide too hastily," said Herrick; "we'll have tiffin first."

"Thank you, but I have decided. There is no use wasting more time. You have my terms; I have yours. The situation is simple. Which one of us intends to change?"

"I don't," vowed Herrick.

"Neither do I."

With these words Nasmith picked up his helmet, bowed to his astonished host, and departed.

"I've made the attempt," said Herrick to himself, much piqued by the failure of tactics he had reckoned sure of success. "I have offered him the choice decently and fairly. If he thinks I am going to seek him out and get down on my knees, begging him to take a girl who is twice too good for him, he can wait till the Yellow River runs dry."

Some such hope had occurred to Nasmith. The knowledge that Nancy had been offered to him acted like sun and rain upon his memory of her, so that only now did he begin to realize how strong was the hold she had gained. Whatever the feeling might be, it disturbed him. In a fever of uneasiness most unusual to his orderly nature he awaited Herrick's next overture, waited till his impatience could be brooked no further. There was that last ever-disquieting threat. Would the father be fool enough or selfish or wrong-headed enough to carry it into effect? Nasmith even regretted his own judgment, his own conduct, right though he knew these had been. At last, unable to contain his distress, he walked the long road to Herrick's temple and found it vacant, with only a bleary-eyed caretaker to tell him Herrick had taken his family, son and daughter, concubine and nurse, back to Peking.

CHAPTER XIV

The departure had been as sudden, as arbitrary, as Herrick's few acts of decision usually were. The household had not recovered from the surprise of Nasmith's visit when orders came to pack. In the mysterious way by which news permeates a Chinese dwelling the subject of Herrick's conversation with his guest was common property while the two men were still debating it. Kuei-lien in great glee told Nancy that her engagement was being arranged. She was to be married to one of the light-haired men who had rescued her, the one with the little moustache under his nose. Nancy, who recognized Nasmith from Kuei-lien's mocking description, blushed a violent red and denied that any such transaction was in progress.

"Oh, yes it is," declared the concubine, "I know. They are discussing your presents right now. What a way to do it, with no middleman! But that's your foreign custom. Soon you'll be squeezing your waist into corsets and hiding your face with a white veil like a mourner. Poor Nancy, you won't have a red chair; foreigners never use them. They'll put you into a motor car and send you to a foreign worship hall where you'll have to kiss your husband and take his hand, so"—Nancy jerked free from Kuei-lien's provoking fingers,—"and then you'll use a knife and a fork and eat goat's meat till you smell like a Mongolian shepherd."

"I won't, I won't, I won't!" vowed Nancy, stamping her foot.

"Don't tease her," begged the nurse, beaming with smiles at the happy news; "you know it is not seemly to talk to a maiden about her future husband."

"Oh, it's quite all right by foreign custom. Your fiancé will come every day to see you; we shall all hide behind the door while you sit and talk and make love together."

"Yes, that is the custom," the amah admitted. "She will grow used to it. She ought to follow the practice of her ancestors."

Nancy, however, had not stayed to listen. She had slammed the doors of her room in their faces and flung herself across the bed, where in the semi-darkness she meditated upon a change she never for a moment doubted had been agreed to. It was while the nurse still triumphantly declaimed the fitness of Nancy's marrying an Englishman that Herrick appeared in the courtyard to deliver his curt message that they were to return to Peking on the morrow. The exultant words were frozen on the tongue of the amah. She had seen in Herrick's eyes the defeat of all her hopes.

Nancy and Edward were miserable at coming back to Peking. It was utterly dispiriting to be fenced by high walls in a garden that had shrunk: no wide views, no sound of tumbling streams, no walks across hills teeming with wild flowers—just the beat of paddles as the clothes were rinsed at the pond and the tedious gossip of women whose minds were confined like their bodies. The boy and girl relapsed into their old routine, took up again studies with their teacher, intermittent lessons with their father, the usual round of writing and reading, yet all with lassitude of spirit, with hearts aching for the hills.

Not even the Mid-autumn Festival, which because of the fewness of the Chinese holidays always had made such a stir in their lives, could wake the children from this lethargy. Nancy passed idly by the flowering cassia, the pride of her courtyard, and wholly forgot to thrust a sprig of the fragrant white blossoms into her hair. More from habit than from relish she ate her round moon cakes and climbed into the pine to see the largest moon of the year rise slowly from the east. She was homesick for her brief hours with Helen and Elizabeth and wrote them letters in English, long, affectionate letters which she could not send because she had no knowledge of where to send them. The exercise did bring some comfort; it seemed to provide some intercourse with her friends, and would have entertained them greatly, could the naïve, oddly phrased missives have found their destination.

Kuei-lien did not visit Nancy as she used to do. The words the daughter had spoken about her father's enemy were hard to forgive. She never pressed Nancy for their meaning because she always avoided unprofitable quarrels, but it became her policy to be cool to the girl, to snub her as one might snub a pert child. Much of the time she spent with the t'ai-t'ai, to whom she had related the tale of the summer. The t'ai-t'ai agreed unreservedly that Nancy and Edward were a problem; they ought to be sent back to the West. She offered no proposal, however, as to how they should be sent. The fact was that she was nursing plans of her own, plans which might not jump with Kuei-lien's humor.

She had gone to her husband, shortly after his return, and taxed him on the subject of her own daughter, Li-an. The girl was twelve. Ought they not to be choosing her a husband?

"Good God!" exclaimed Herrick in English, "have we got to find another?"

"My heart will have no peace till she is engaged," she said.

"But Li-an is only a babe in arms."

"She is twelve," the mother repeated.

"I hardly know the child. Bring her here. Let me talk to her."

Herrick's attention had in truth been so predominantly centred on Nancy and Edward that the second daughter came before her father like a stranger. There had never been the contact of English lessons to quicken his knowledge of this fast growing girl.

"Yes, she is pretty," he thought to himself, "and, thank heaven, Chinese."

Herrick examined the scholarship of his daughter, put many questions which she answered cleverly. Then the whim seized him to ask what he had asked of Nancy, to see how she would pass the test of bringing what she valued most. Li-an went at once to her mother and told her of Herrick's strange request.

"The most precious thing you have?" inquired the t'ai-t'ai. "What a thing to ask! We must think about it and make sure not to disappoint him. You might take a copy of Mencius, or the Four Books, or perhaps your ink-stone and brush. No, they won't do; I have a much better plan."

She extracted a photograph from her box.

"Take that," she said; "that will please him."

Herrick received the photograph and looked at it curiously. Then he frowned. The picture was one of himself taken years before, a portrait which revealed its subject in the stiff pose so dear to Chinese photographers: there were flower pots bestowed in harsh symmetry on either side of him, a drop painted to show trees and balustrades behind, and Herrick, glued to the chair, facing the camera with exasperated belligerency as though daring the lens to do its worst—which it did. The man had forgotten such a picture existed. In a moment of weakness he had given way before the entreaties of the t'ai-t'ai and consented to its being taken.

"Who put you up to bringing this atrocity?" he demanded. He tore the picture asunder and threw the pieces on the floor.

"Tell your mother," he said, "that it is rather early to be teaching her daughter to lie."

The t'ai-t'ai appeared, full of explanations, full of apologies. The child had been puzzled by her father's command, and was unhappy because she had nothing precious enough to take to her father.

"So I asked her whom she honored most. 'My father,' Li-an answered, 'of course I honor my father more than anybody.' I showed her the photograph merely to test her and instantly she begged me to let her have it. When I saw the happiness come over her face and how she valued it I suggested that this was the gift to bring to her father. I am sorry it displeased you, but there was no time to frame it suitably."

The excuse was so much more flagrant than the offense itself that the man could not keep back a burst of laughter.

"Not even from your lips can two lies cancel each other, my good lady," he remarked dryly in English. The t'ai-t'ai was a standard by which he could mark his growing absorption into Chinese life and realize how much deeper he still needed to sink himself before the waters covered his soul.

"I'm afraid your daughter is much too clever," he said, openly accepting Li-an's ill-advised act as a joke. "Fancy a child of twelve practising such artful wiles on her old father."

The mother's face beamed in relief.

"But we mustn't be in too great a hurry in choosing her a husband. We must make certain of a suitable man. Meantime I want your help in something far more pressing. You realize of course that Nancy is four years older than Li-an. We must make some arrangement for her; we can't delay it any longer. I thought for a time of marrying her to an Englishman, but now that I have been thinking about the matter I know that Nancy, though she is English-born, can never be at home in the West. She is Chinese by nature and training and speech, and Chinese she ought to remain; so now I am determined to find a Chinese husband for Nancy, and I want you to be matchmaker. Please don't annoy me by a statement of objections and difficulties; I know these as well as you. But there are a few points to keep in mind: first, I must see the man you suggest. I am not going to be put off with any dunderheads; I want the best. If I can't get the best there will be no engagement. Furthermore, the man must be of good family; he must be well educated, a man of scholarly tastes—and he must know no English, no English at all. I won't have a son-in-law sucking his breath and grinning at his own smartness as he gibbers 'Yes-s' and 'Alright.' Do you understand?"

The woman nodded.

"You may think I am asking the impossible in expecting such a paragon. Well, you know the proverb that what we value cheaply we sell cheaply. We don't need to apologize for Nancy and I will not have you setting about this task as though we were asking favors. Yet of course there will be a prejudice against the girl because of her foreign birth. That perhaps will frighten the conservative families, the very families we ought to look to for decent, obedient, scholarly boys. I am ready to make one concession to overcome the handicap of Nancy's having been born English; if I am satisfied with the man you choose, I will give Nancy a portion of ten thousand taels at her marriage; if I am very well satisfied, I might stretch the sum to fifteen thousand."

After this last offer, which outweighed all Herrick's other provisions, the t'ai-t'ai accepted her commission as matchmaker. She was admirably fitted for the post, since she came of good family herself, an excellent but impecunious family with many ramifications, many branches, all prolific of sons and daughters, all equally genteel, all equally poor. Within the confines of her own family the t'ai-t'ai knew she could find many candidates for Nancy's hand. She did not propose to look further.

Her father had been Herrick's teacher of Chinese. He was a gentleman of the old school, a scholar of distinction, benignant in his ways, a fountainhead of Chinese lore. The family had been broken by the disgrace of the patron, whom an arbitrary whim of the Empress Dowager had banished from court. Without exception every man of the family had been thrown out of official employment. Years of vain waiting for reinstatement had followed: they could not dig; to beg they were ashamed. Swiftly their fortune melted away till Herrick's future father-in-law broke with tradition by undertaking to instruct foreigners in the obscurities of the Mandarin tongue.

For a long time he was the only man of his extensive family who deigned to work. The others continued from day to day, living always on the edge of solvency, getting food and clothing by some mysterious means of which Chinese families are rarely so impoverished as to lose the secret; they had been rather contemptuous over the one member who stooped to teach foreign devils for a living, but they did not scruple to share in the profits of his abasement; they were outraged by his marrying a daughter to a foreign devil, but always borrowed a liberal part of the money the t'ai-t'ai brought home as her gift to the exchequer. They waited and taught their sons and grandsons to wait for the turn of affairs which might restore them to office, restore them to the emoluments of magistracies and deputy inspectorships. Waiting had become the family profession and was practised with all the assiduity of the Oriental who has known better times and feels sure that in some lucky cycle of the future, in the wheel which shifts dynasties and oligarchies and republics and chaos, fate again will provide better times to her patient servants. The t'ai-t'ai, surveying the case, decided that fifteen thousand taels would be an extremely useful addition to the family fortunes, the very harbinger of better times. There was more profit to be made out of Nancy than out of her own daughter Li-an, for Nancy, being no kin, could be married to a member of her prolific family, whereas Li-an's dowry would be swallowed by some other voracious clan. It would be foolish to let fifteen thousand taels slip out of her hands to the advantage of someone else. With so many nephews and cousins sitting idle at home, one surely could be sacrificed in the interests of the family, even to contract something so undesirable as a mixed marriage.

The t'ai-t'ai put the reins of the household into the hands of the nurse—she was always careful not to give power to a concubine—and after she had stipulated this and stipulated that, lest the old amah wax rich in her absence, she climbed into a mule cart and started lumbering along the dusty ruts of the road home.

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."

Kuei-lien's bitter moods, her uneasy habit of thinking too deeply, made her singularly outspoken, but Nancy refused to listen further. Her only peace was to be carried on as in a dream. She could not bear to stare at her fate set forth in these visible pictures.

The bedstead, the chairs, the boxes all went their festive way to her new home, where soothsayers ensured the fortunate placing of the bed. Her father's house was draped with red, the walls were hung with scarlet banners on which "joy" was repeated in huge characters of gilt, characters written double to amplify the luck of the occasion. The courtyards were roofed with red bunting and the first chrysanthemums of the season banked high against the walls. Into the nightly feasting Nancy did not intrude, and her father did not appear, did not trust himself to see Nancy. He was ill, feeble, uncomforted by the bustle which echoed even into his silent room.

For the last evening a great feast was prepared and though only the women of the household and their kinsfolk took part, Herrick having no outside guests to invite, they made the most of their one great chance to be merry over an event which promised no good fortune to any of their number. It was the t'ai-t'ai's affair, this wedding, but that was no reason for declining the baked meats of their enemy's bounty. So they were quite cheerful and quite eager to see the girl who had lived with them, so aloof and yet so intimate, clothed at last in her bridal garments.

In her last afternoon the t'ai-t'ai came to Nancy's room to tell her stepdaughter it was time. Everything was prepared. She now needed only to put up her hair and put on her dress for the ceremonial farewell to her own family and then retire to the night's vigil of weeping and vain efforts at sleep, weeping and sleeping both rigidly prescribed by custom, before the bridal chair was heralded by trumpets in the morning. Kuei-lien came in behind the t'ai-t'ai; Li-an and a maid followed her. They had brought the clothes which the bride was now formally to try on to make sure that all was ready for the morrow.

Nancy rose without comment and was as quiet as a puppet in their hands, raising her arms or turning her head at their bidding. A square of red carpet was laid on the floor for her to stand upon. Slowly and with great deliberation Kuei-lien and her helpers proceeded to their work, the dignity of the season making them linger over each detail. The girl was divested of her own garments, bathed and scented, and the cotton of her former undergarments replaced by linen on which symbols of good luck had been embroidered in cross-stitch. The t'ai-t'ai exclaimed upon the pity of Nancy's unbound feet and deplored the new custom of large feet, which would ruin China, she vowed, but Kuei-lien defended new fashions at the expense of old, while the girl who was the subject of their debate gave no signs of listening, but allowed her body to be assessed without reply. Sometimes she watched the fingers that were busy with her; for the most part she kept her fixed gaze upon the carpet. A panel of cloth was tied with strings round her waist and hung by a silver chain from her neck. Stockings of scarlet silk were pulled up to her knees. She stepped unresistingly into the undermost pair of long pantaloons and let the tunic that matched them be slipped softly down her arms. Then, at the precise minute the soothsayers had set, began the unbraiding of her thick hair, the sign that she was to be a maiden no more; slowly it was soaked with resin, pulled across her head till it matched the smoothness of enamel, and gathered in a lustrous clump at the back, a clump into which Kuei-lien thrust blade-like pins of soft gold. The fringe of down round her forehead would not be pulled out till she came to her new home.

The concubine and her helpers stood back to admire the change they had made. Then over the face of the bride they dusted clouds of powder, and brushed it half away again before they softened the spectral white with an artfully applied surface of rouge. Nancy seemed to cease breathing while they reddened her lips; she closed her eyes while they penciled the graceful arch of the brows. Her face had become like the mask of a tragic figure, something removed from life, yet deeply instilled with the most pitiful passions of life, austere and delicate, sombre and youthful, possessed of a beauty which a day could destroy, yet which promised in its singularly immobile pose to live forever, an unforgettable memory. Nancy had lost her personality; she had become a symbol. The age-old traditions of the bridal took her out of common places and common scenes, they invested her with sadness and fear, made her too holy to be touched, too lovely to be worshiped, set upon her face the pathetic seal of flowers at their blossoming.

Even the scoffing spirit of Kuei-lien was awed by her handiwork. With a caressing touch the concubine proceeded to her task, helping Nancy into the voluminous scarlet folds of her skirt, fastening the gold buttons of her scarlet tunic, slipping bangles over her wrists and setting gently on her glossy hair the headdress of pearls. There now remained only the veil of red silk to be placed over her face before she entered the chair. For the rest, Nancy was the bride complete, and Kuei-lien, in an unwonted mood of reverence, could not resist bowing before the brilliant vision.

Dusk had come. Hours had gone by. Nancy came forth, assisted by Kuei-lien, to take farewell of the family among whom she had lived so long and so happily. The all-provident t'ai-t'ai had made ready an altar with a bright new tablet to Nancy's unrecorded ancestors. In the first grayness of twilight the red candles glowed in their pewter sticks, the incense went up in faint spirals, the courtyard was redolent of burning sandalwood. The women stood round, hushed by a spirit of awe close to tears, when the bride bowed gravely in front of the glittering tablet, separating herself by this simple act from the host of spirits whose name she had borne. With the same trance-like dignity Nancy bowed to the t'ai-t'ai. Then she let herself be led to her father, who was too ill, too sad to receive her worship before the eyes of the feasters. The door was opened and she was allowed to go in alone. She stood motionless before her father.

Timothy Herrick stared as though his mind scarcely could believe what his eyes saw. He seemed struggling to realize that this vision of scarlet and gold was his daughter, come at last to say good-bye. For the first time in the long tedium of the day's events, Nancy lifted up her eyes. She paid her whole debt of loyalty with that one look and then, behind the tragic splendor of her dress, behind the loveliness of brocades that outshone the blood-red lustre of flames, her spirit seemed to withdraw, as though she had said good-bye. Nancy became only a memory in the sight of her father.

The man trembled with a great moan of despair, scarlet and gold blinded his eyes; suddenly, with a cry that rasped in his throat, Herrick threw himself forward, buried his head in his arms, and so lay still amid the vain litter of his desk.

Nancy waited for him to speak, quite forgetting it was her time to kneel and bow. Finally, when the silence seemed hopeless, when the clock had ticked away many empty minutes, and still with no sign from her father, she realized that someone was leading her away again, that Kuei-lien was leading her back to her own room. She had left the presence of her father without the kindness of one last word. There had been so much to say, so much she wanted to tell him; yet her heart had been sapped of emotion till the girl was not even sorry for this wordless parting.

Only one thing could have wakened her spirit, and this she did not know. She had been too tired to see that not she, but her father, had been the first to go out from his home.

CHAPTER XXVII

Into her own room the noise of the feasters could not penetrate. The red candles burned with a steady gleam.

"I think I shall take this room when you are gone," said Kuei-lien; "it is quieter than mine."

There was a light tap on the door.

"I must leave you now," announced the concubine, in the same teasing voice; "it is time for you to weep. You must weep, you know. All brides are supposed to weep. Your ancestors will be angry if they see you showing no signs of sadness at leaving them. We shall all measure your affection for us by the noise you make. Your father will be listening with a watch in his hand. But, however much you wail, don't spoil your dress. I shall be back soon to undress you so that it will be fresh for the morning."

The tap on the door was repeated. Kuei-lien stepped gingerly round the red carpet and went softly out of the room. To her surprise she found the t'ai-t'ai waiting outside. Despite the dim light she could see deep agitation in the woman's face; she followed without any sound into her own room. The t'ai-t'ai looked to make sure the door was fastened; her attention was strained as though she suspected the walls of bending down to catch her words.

"The Great Man is dead," she said in a voice almost too low for Kuei-lien to hear.

"What!" exclaimed the girl. "Dead? It can't be. It is not true. How can he be dead? We have only just come from his room."

"I found him dead. He was lying with his head across his desk."

Kuei-lien considered the sentence for a moment.

"Yes, so he was," she admitted.

"I could not move him," went on the t'ai-t'ai. "His life must have gone out like that." She clicked her tongue. "I knew he was dead when I touched him. Ah, what a time to die, what a time to die!"

This last exclamation brought back to Kuei-lien the needs of the moment. The possibilities of her own future were too immense to be considered now; they were like disordered fragments strewn across the floor of her brain, baffling her as to how to begin sorting them, and so there was respite from her own peril diverting her thoughts to the problem of Nancy's wedding. That at least was less disturbing than the prospect of what might happen to her.

"Well, I suppose this must postpone the marriage," she said, trying to see what was in the mind of her mistress; "at least it delays it for the hundred days, doesn't it?"

"But we can't postpone the marriage," moaned the woman; "the money hasn't been paid."

"The money hasn't been paid?" asked Kuei-lien incredulously. "But we shall have no face at all if we go on with a wedding when the master is dead in the house. That would be impossible. We are not coolies. What would men say?"

"We must go on with it," persisted the t'ai-t'ai. Then she grew more secretive. "No one knows he is dead, unless it be Nancy. He must have died while she was there. What was she doing when you went in?"

"Just standing there, looking at her feet."

"You were outside all the time?"

"Yes."

"What did you hear? Did the girl do anything or say anything?"

"She did nothing, I am sure of that. She just stood, waiting for him to speak. She might have stood all night; she's like that. She didn't know he never would speak again. Finally I grew tired and pushed the door open. And there he was, with his head on the table"—Kuei-lien could not help shivering at the memory—"and she was staring at the floor. I couldn't see any more use in her doing that—ai, it was more useless than I thought! I took her hand and brought her out again."

"Then she can't have guessed that he was dead," exclaimed the t'ai-t'ai with a gasp of relief. "She surely would have cried out. She can't have guessed, she certainly can't have guessed. You must go back to her and see that she doesn't get some crazy impulse, some crazy notion of running back to her father's room to say good-bye. I am never sure of what she may do next. It is never safe to trust her. If she doesn't know, then we are all right. What good would it do to tell her now? She will learn quickly enough."

"Yes, she will—poor child," Kuei-lien said.

"It's no use telling anyone till she's safely away in her chair. I have locked his door. What time does she go?"

"At seven; the chair will be here about six."

"Good. It's only for a night. After she's gone it won't matter if we find out that the Great Man is dead. It will be too late to stop the wedding. But it mustn't be known to-night. That would just make matters difficult for all of us and wouldn't do him any good. Aren't we carrying out his own wishes? And who knows what that girl might do if we postponed the wedding? With her father gone, there's not a soul in the house can control that stubborn will of hers. You go back to her and I'll see that he isn't disturbed."

"They would have to make a lot of noise to disturb him now," Kuei-lien said.

She found Nancy sitting stiffly, gazing with dry eyes at the candles.

"Haven't you wept?" she asked, with a gesture of playful reproof. "Ah, but never mind, Nancy, you will weep!"

The bride still persisted in silence.

"Come, Nancy," Kuei-lien urged, "you must talk; you must say something. I haven't heard you say a word to-day. What are you thinking about?"

"I am not thinking," answered Nancy.

"What a perfect nun you would make," laughed the concubine. "I wish I could stop thinking. But it's no use, my dear, practising these nunnery manners for the bridal bed. And even if you don't want to think, you ought to talk. There is nothing better than talk when your heart is in pain. Lots of talk, never mind what it's about, as long as it keeps your mind from thinking. I have had to talk for years, Nancy. I have had to make myself talk. You will too. You are only just beginning to know what life is."

Kuei-lien was treating herself richly to her own medicine. In the last few weeks her manner toward Nancy had been growing increasingly kinder till she found herself bearing Nancy's pain with her own. To-night, in this still room, the secret that lay between herself and the girl she was tending overpowered her veins with a surging pity so that she chattered desperately to hold back the recurring treacherous need to break down and weep.

With an understanding gentleness she removed one by one Nancy's brilliant garments while the girl submitted as obediently as a child. Nancy's splendor slipped from her like autumn leaves blown down by a wind, leaving her white and solitary and helpless.

"You are beautiful, Nancy," said Kuei-lien, unconsciously echoing Elizabeth's tribute of long ago. Yet she could not resist teasing the girl.

"Your husband will have to do this for you to-morrow night. They will make him drunk, I expect, to give him courage. But his hands won't be so gentle as mine. Yes, Nancy, you will miss even me."

Her sympathy, however, would not let her prod the wound she had made. Kuei-lien's heart was sad, for Nancy's sake and her own. She began humming a little song as she worked:—

"Leaves like scarlet rain in the air,
Leaves like scarlet dew on the ground,
Wheeling to the earth with no sound,
Leaving high branches gray and bare."

She took off Nancy's gay slippers with the whimsical thought that her hands were the destroying wind. But her tongue could not cease humming:—

"Yellow leaves strew down golden snow,
Yellow leaves golden on the ground,
Making hearts forlorn with their sound,
Naked branches cold when they go."

"What shall I do when I don't have you to sing to, Nancy?" she asked, as she took off the bright bangles from the arms of the bride.

"You will have my father to sing to," Nancy answered.

"Yes, I shall have your father to sing to."

Kuei-lien almost wept. She tried hurriedly to hide her confusion in more words of her song:—

"Swift the summer sun in his day,
Swift the autumn moon in her night,
Slow the winter frost with its blight,
Trampling golden leaves from its way."

She stood up to lift off Nancy's headdress of pearls. Then she put them on again, and stood back to admire their sinuous lustre against the dark hair of the girl.

"Ah, a bride can never be so beautiful to another as she is beautiful to herself," she sighed.

And yet, she thought, these jewels were the last sight Timothy Herrick had seen on earth. No wonder he covered his eyes so that he might take their loveliness with him into the grave. She covered her own eyes to keep back the tears.

"Gold youth, scarlet love, each must fade,
Moon and stars cease shining in the night,
Winter snows shall long glimmer white,
Scarlet leaves and gold low are laid."

She went softly to the girl and lifted off the pearls like a crown.

"And now," she said, "you must sleep."

CHAPTER XXVIII

The noise of crackers broke into the first light of the day. Nancy woke, scarcely understanding where she was or that this was her bridal day. She had not expected to sleep. Kuei-lien had withdrawn, leaving her lying open-eyed on her bed. She had watched the tranquil candles which even now still flickered, low and gutted though they were. Her heart had been dumb with uneasiness. She could not drive from her mind the thought that she had something to say to her father and that now it was too late to say it. Three or four times she had been on the point of stealing through the quiet house to see him, to revive for the last time those moments of infinite tenderness when he had seemed to know, without her telling, every secret of her heart. But she was afraid, and, before she realized it, had fallen into a sleep so troubled that it was like being awake. Now came the burst of firecrackers and the weird sound of the pipes. Kuei-lien came bustling into the room.

"It is time to be up, Nancy," she called cheerfully, "the bridal chair has come."

Then with the help of Li-an and the maidservant began the solemn ritual they had made trial of yesterday, the clothing of the bride. But none of them could recapture yesterday's deep feeling. In the chill light the bride emerged, looking tired and sleepy, much too pale for the richness of her dress. She pretended to eat the breakfast which was offered her and waited calmly for the proper moment to cross the courtyard to the hall where the chair had been set. At last the t'ai-t'ai appeared with her niece, who had come to fetch the bride. The flutes began once again their unvarying tune. Men with sashes across the shoulders threw down squares of red carpet under her feet and picked them up again behind her as she walked slowly from her room to the great reception hall. Kuei-lien and the t'ai-t'ai's newly arrived niece supported her, each holding an arm. The air was blue with the smoke of the crackers.

The hallway seemed dim after the courtyard. The lanterns were swathed in red silk. The candles on the gleaming altar were choked with clouds of incense. Nancy was so dazed by the smoke and the noise that she did not see at first the chair with its trappings of gold and green and purple and blue heavily embroidered on the scarlet satin; she raised her eyes for one swift glance at its gorgeous canopy; became aware of the crowd admiring its splendor, the plumed phœnix on the crest, the painted images of children, tasseled flowers; she saw Edward's woebegone face, the bright skirts of the women, all mixed together by the trembling confusion of her eyes. Then the t'ai-t'ai advanced, holding out the long robe writhing with golden dragons.

"Isn't my father coming?" the girl suddenly asked.

She was anxious that his hands at least should put the veil over her face.

"He is not well enough to come," answered the t'ai-t'ai.

There was a guilty hesitation in the reply which caused Nancy to look long and carefully at her stepmother. For a moment she delayed, for a moment even pondered brushing aside all the futile ceremony in her mad wish to know what was wrong with her father. Then, as quickly, she silenced the words on her lips and held out her arms to let her body be vested with the heavy robe. There was an instant in which every heart seemed to stand still. Acting for Nancy's absent parents, the t'ai-t'ai fastened the long veil of red silk across the face of the bride. It was so thick that the girl could see nothing. Everyone stared in great quietness at the muffled figure, which swayed a little when the attendant women helped the bride step by step into her chair. She sat down, hidden away in darkness by the curtained windows. The doors were closed in front of her; their two sides joined together the severed character for happiness. There was a perceptible click as the lock was slipped into place, a bare instant before the fresh outburst of crackers, the tumult of horns and flutes, the loud weeping of the amah, the sound of Edward's crying, the ear-shattering din as the musicians and lantern-bearers formed their hectic procession, and the scarlet-girdled coolies struggled with their huge chair.

Nancy had come close to her threat to stop thinking, but she could not stop feeling, just as Ronald had predicted. She sat, stiff and listless, making no effort to lift the veil that cloaked her face. There would be nothing to see if she did. The windows were too securely shrouded, the doors too safely fastened. She kept no count of time, knowing the procession would thread many streets on the way to her new home, making the bravest show money would allow. Far ahead came the repeated explosion of crackers, almost incessantly the trumpets brayed, and the flutes kept up their monotonous lilting music. The girl could feel the hum of people round her and hear the noise of traffic in the streets brought to a momentary standstill by her passing. But she felt no glory, no exultation in this high moment of her life. Her body was cold with fear and her heart already sick from loneliness, weary of the ride yet dreading its finish, dreading her delivery like a well-selected piece of merchandise into the hands of strangers.

Just when her mind had been lulled into a state of throbbing blankness she realized that the roar of firecrackers had redoubled, the musicians were blowing themselves into an accelerated frenzy of noise; the pace of the coolies slackened. The chair was set down; the long poles were withdrawn. She felt men pick it up at the four corners, and she clung to the sides as they toiled with their load, jerking and pitching the unhappy bride across the threshold of her new home.

It was difficult for Nancy to collect her spirits in the great uproar of her arrival, but the heavy veil, hiding her face from all observers, helped the girl at least to look calm when the doors of the chair were unlocked and she was led stiffly across the room and seated on the bridal bed beside her husband. She gave herself entirely into the hands of her attendants. At their direction she knelt and bowed four times to the tablets of heaven and earth and then to her still invisible husband.

Now came the great moment, when, having been seated a second time beside Ming-te, she suffered him to lift the veil from her face. She felt rather than saw his anxiety, felt rather than saw the curiosity of the crowd gathered in the door, all breathless to see what the face of this foreign bride should be. There were reassuring exclamations of approval, loud whispers of admiration at her beauty, all bitter praise to the girl whose cheeks needed no paint to heighten their flushed color. In her bewildered trance Nancy hardly knew what was done next. She was too shamefaced to steal even a glance at her youthful husband, but received silently the gilded cups of wine with which she and Ming-te plighted their troth. She did not think of touching the food which was set before them or to make even the pretense of eating, but sat in mute embarrassment, catching just a glimpse of Ming-te's trembling hands as he helped himself to the nuptial cakes. The wedding was completed. She knew that she was irrevocably the wife of this unknown, still unseen stranger. She had no courage to lift her eyes to his.

Through a long day's ceremonies she bore her part with the same unbending dignity. But all the time, when she managed to be outwardly calm enough to worship alien ancestors; to bow down before the parents of the bridegroom; to stand beside her husband and, at the command of the master of ceremonies, to do an endless series of salutations to the many guests who had come; even in the moments when she was allowed to withdraw with attendants to her room, her real life went round and round in a whirl of tempestuous thoughts. The merrymaking, the feasting, the noise and excitement of savory dishes being served, of wine being drunk, wine being spilt, the loud shouts of men at their games, touched her so lightly that she did not observe a sudden change in the festivities, a momentary pause as though of hearts stricken with fear, words of whispered debate, before the renewal of the merriment in a defiant spirit which was not loud enough to drown the buzzing undertone of conversation in which the word "unlucky," "unlucky," was bandied to and fro. She missed the first news that her father was dead, and went tranquilly through the rites assigned to her without knowing her new loneliness.

The news had thrown the feasters into consternation, not because they had ever met or regretted Herrick, but because his untimely death was so bad an augury for this marriage. To die in the height of the merrymaking—they could not forgive him for that. There were those who deplored the strange match and thought he might have died early enough to postpone, even to prevent it; others thought he might have died later. But to die when his death could be neither hindrance nor help and with no result except to throw gloom upon the feast, that was unspeakably bad taste. To the dismayed family of the bridegroom the shock was still harder. They were angry at being balked even for a few days of the dowry which should by now have been paid, and were not nearly so sure as their kinswoman, the t'ai-t'ai, that Herrick had not cheated them by his death.

For the moment, however, they tried to put the best face on things and when the question arose as to whether the girl should be told, they decided to leave her ignorant till the morrow. Fate had been spiteful enough. It would never do to mar the auspices of the bridal bed by mentioning so unpropitious a word as death. The first hush of panic gave way to a delirium of mirth. Hosts and guests alike were determined to forget the grim shadow which had disturbed them, to put outside the gates of their memory the hideous demon who snatches souls from the living. More and more hot wine they poured into the cups. Voices yelled; hands were flung helter-skelter in the fury of "slippery fist," the wild game of guessing fingers and urging one another into a state of drunken hilarity. Everyone sought to pledge the bridegroom till the unfortunate youth scarcely could totter on his feet and saw lights and faces going round in giddy spirals. The young men who supported him did stout duty in his defense, discarding the wine cups little bigger than thimbles and calling for the more capacious teacups in which to measure staggering potations.

By evening time no one cared whether Herrick had died yesterday or to-day or a thousand years ago.

People from the streets had joined the guests in a clamorous entry into the bridal chamber, long before which time Nancy had been taken from the quieter feast of the women and prepared for the ordeal to which every Chinese bride must submit, when she stands the rude inspection of the crowd. This is always an occasion of ribald wit,—curiously allowed by the custom of years,—in which strangers do their best by the indelicacy of their remarks to disconcert and embarrass the "new woman." But the fact of Nancy's being a foreigner added spice to the event; it made the girl a natural victim of the worst pranks the crowd could concoct. And the freedom with which wine had flowed stirred men to pitiless depths of cruelty in torturing their prey. They teased the girl with unbridled lust of word and gesture such as would have revolted any of them in his right senses. During the three long hours of this orgy the husband of course remained discreetly absent,—he was in fact too sick to come,—while Nancy was compelled to stand beside the gaudy bed, submitting to every whim of her tormentors without a word of defense or even a sign that she was noticing their obscene spite, and with no attendant except an amah almost as much a stranger as the rest.

The men crowded round her in a mocking circle. They discussed every feature of her body with abominable frankness, pulled up her skirts, pinched her legs, examined the bangles on her arms, chucked her freely under the chin, tried to force wine between her teeth. The amah, whose business it was to play the buffoon and draw these attacks from her mistress by rollicking diversions, was too mean-spirited a creature to perform her part, and let Nancy suffer the full force of their lewdness unhindered. There was much laughter over the drunkenness of the bridegroom; he would be quite unable to share the bridal bed, the crowd boasted, and the most boisterous of them played fingers to see who should sleep with this handsome foreign devil in his place. The thought tickled their wits; they pulled out clothes from Nancy's boxes, dressed themselves in a mocking masquerade, threw themselves on the bed, amid howling applause, to portray an indecent drama of Nancy's modesty and Nancy's shame. Through it all she stood with half-averted face, eyes and cheeks ablaze, pretending neither to hear nor to see, knowing too well that the least sign of anger would draw down the redoubled hostility of her persecutors.

Yet, despite her outward passivity, the experience was burning deep marks upon her heart. She began to realize what she had protested against all her life, that she was in truth a foreigner. The pleasant manners of her father's household had deceived her too long. The little differences between herself and her father's wives had been too slight, too amiably adjusted, to make her know the cleavage of race that divided her own instincts from the instincts of the Chinese among whom she had been trained. She had beguiled herself with books, with romance and poetry, with the language which came by first impulse to her lips, but now she understood what a lie she had been living all these wasted years.

Late in the evening, long after Nancy's feelings had been outraged into a state of numbness, the coarse abuse of the bride brought signs of reaction. The befuddling effects of the wine were wearing off and some began to feel compassion for the girl who had borne so unflinchingly a measure of evil treatment which even they, with many memories of such bride-baiting, had never seen matched. Sympathies veered. Those who had held their tongues through the worst indignities now commenced to find them; their appetite for cruelty was sated. Yet the irony of the event was that these impulses of pity should deal the girl her sorest wound.

"Shame!" cried one man, hardier than the rest. "You are a coward to treat a girl so when her heart must be sorrowing for the death of her father."

The remark, uttered with such loud scorn, hushed the mob for a moment. In their sport many had forgotten Nancy's bereavement; some had never known of it. The fickle crowd responded to an instant's compunction. There ensued a brief but appalling silence, and when the sport was resumed it was never with the former heartiness. Little by little the throng began to dwindle. Guests and onlookers slipped away till only the more obstinate braves, hilarious intimates of the family, stayed to stipulate with the groomsmen a feast for the morrow as the price of their leaving husband and wife to a first night's undisturbed felicity.

But the outcry of Nancy's one defender, which was a quickly forgotten incident to the others, made the torture and coarseness of the evening trivial to the wretched girl learning for the first time that her father was dead. She turned strangely calm, strangely rational, as though she never had been so gravely alive, but her one mastering desire was to talk to someone about her father, to pour out her words, to make him live on the frantic accents of her tongue.

At last the room was quiet. The candles had been changed for those which should burn through the night. Nancy's mother-in-law appeared to speak a few formal phrases to the bride and to see that the attending women were doing their part properly in making her ready for bed. Then the bridegroom, amid fresh jesting on the part of his family, was led to the chamber. Nancy did not sit up to look at him, but waited till the others had withdrawn. She heard them tittering outside, but she paid no heed to other people, once the heavy doors had been shut. With slow scrutinizing gaze she stared at the youth who stood timidly beside the bed. It was the first time she had seen him.

Ming-te had a face marked both by intelligence and by weakness. He was handsome, with quick bright eyes, a skin of singular clarity, a slightness of figure which made him seem younger than the girl he had married. His distaste for being confined in this embarrassing loneliness with his bride made him seem the weaker of the two, and Nancy knew by instinct that he was no match for her strong will. His family had overplayed their part in rousing his courage with wine; he was trembling from the effects of sickness, the nausea of unfamiliar drunkenness, and failed of confidence to meet Nancy's look.

"Is my father dead?" the girl suddenly asked him.

He stammered with surprise at the directness of this question.

"Yes," at last he nerved himself to admit.

"How long have you known it?"

"I—I have known it—I don't know when I knew it."

"And you let them do all these things when you knew my father was dead?"

The boy opposed a sullen reserve. He felt it was wrong that he should submit to scolding on the first night of his wedding, but he was glad for any excuse to talk. He was afraid of this outspoken foreigner. Nancy divined his thoughts.

"Did you wish to be married?" she asked. "Your parents made you, I suppose. You had to be here, didn't you? I didn't. I married to please my father."

There was pride in her voice, pride ill assorted with the humiliation she had suffered, with the sorrow her heart seemed not large enough to contain.

"I didn't please him. I killed him. I don't belong to you," she cried, with a sudden gust of bitterness that showed her shame had not been forgotten. "I don't belong to you. I married to make my father happy, and he isn't happy. You are only a schoolboy; you don't understand these things. I don't see you; I see my father. I don't even think of you; I think of him. They knew he was dead and yet they went on with this marriage. They deceived me and tricked me into coming here when I ought to be at home and weeping. They put up red candles and sent the red chair for me when they knew he was dead. They pulled you away from your books, did they, all because they were afraid they would lose the money my father promised? And so they forced you to marry a foreigner—how many taels was it?"

Ming-te stood like the schoolboy Nancy declared him to be. His attitude suggested dread of the ferule poised above his head.

"I am sorry for you," Nancy went on. "No luck will come out of this marriage." She looked at the huge gilt characters on the scarlet banners which lined the wall. "Hsi! Hsi! Hsi! Hsi!" she exclaimed, mocking their message of happiness. "Happiness everywhere, paper happiness. There is no happiness in your heart or mine, and you know it. Your own ancestors would cry out against the blasphemy. I would never have worshiped them to-day if I had known my father was dead. We have disgraced them. I thought your family were an honorable family, that they used to be officials, that they served the Emperor, yet they have shown themselves no better than small-livered coolies. Happiness!" she muttered again with intense passion. "What happiness can result from dishonoring the dead?"

Suddenly she forgot the awkward boy at her side. The aching freshness of her loss made her too miserable to defy him. She choked down a sob of despair, hiding her face in the gayly embroidered pillow.

"Oh, my father, my father, my father," she wailed, "why did you leave me, why did you leave me alone, why couldn't you stay with me! I want you!"

It was the first time her spirit had given way, the first time she had broken down through all the prolonged travail which had brought her so fearfully step by step to this unendurable moment. And as if to seize the advantage of her defeat, the door opened; her new parents appeared. They were white with anger at the tales of the eavesdroppers who had been listening to the events of the bridal chamber from outside and had heard Nancy upbraiding her irresolute master.

"You call yourself a man," scoffed the mother, seizing her son, "you a man, to be bullied by your wife on her bridal night, to let her devil of a tongue steal your courage? Small joy shall we have from such a yellow-mouthed milksop as you!"

She bundled him like a disobedient truant into bed, taunting him with her sarcasm, stinging him into hatred for the girl who had made him ridiculous, till he did not care whether he stifled her bruised body with his passion.

CHAPTER XXIX

News of Herrick's death reached Ronald Nasmith almost as quickly as it reached the family of the dead man. The t'ai-t'ai was anxious to settle the business of his estate and lost no time in sending Edward, who could speak English, as her ambassador.

Ronald was at home when the boy came. He brought him into his own study, for he knew, after one glance at his face, the errand upon which he had come.

"My father is dead," said Edward, sitting stiffly on the edge of his chair. He could make no more than this simple statement.

"I thought he must be," Ronald answered, "but where is Nancy? Why didn't she come with you?"

He was afraid to hear the answer, but hear it he must.

"She is married. She was married yesterday."

Ronald toyed nervously with an ivory paper-cutter on his desk.

"Only yesterday," he said at last; "and when did your father die?"

"He died yesterday too."

"And who sent you to me?"

"The t'ai-t'ai."

"I understand."

He did understand much for which it was hopeless to seek words.

"This will be your home now," he told Edward, "your home till we can put you in a proper school. I promised your father that. You don't wish to live there, do you, now that your father has gone and Nancy has gone?"

"No," the boy answered bravely.

"Now I must see what I can do. Your father left me a lot of business to finish. But you must come with me and help me. I might not make myself clear and there will be a lot I shall need you to explain."

The boy accepted all that he said without question. Together they returned to the mourning household, which mocked the clear sunshine of the streets with its gloom. Ronald had unutterable thoughts as he entered the gate from which Nancy had gone out one day too soon in the loneliness of her scarlet chair. He could not bear to dwell upon this picture, but asked to see the body of her father and went with a sigh of weariness upon his lips into the room where with difficulty, with much labored unbending of stiff limbs, they had laid out the corpse. The boy was afraid to come in. Ronald stood by himself and looked at a face which made death terrible.

The women had taken up their burden of wailing when he entered the house; harshly the noise struck his ears, for in Herrick's quiet features he could find no answer to the riddle of why the dead man had lived only to come to this pitiless ending. His only satisfaction was to see that Herrick did not sleep peacefully, that he had not died content; the restless lines in Herrick's face told their own story.

The ill-fated time of his death had upset his unstable family. The women could not face this blow right on the heels of their excitement at Nancy's wedding. In their panic over what their future might be, they had neglected the first rites of the dead and were weeping uselessly, undecided what respect they should pay to the dead man whom, despite his years of pretension, they remembered only as a foreigner.

But the t'ai-t'ai was recovering her wits when Ronald asked for her.

"She wants," Edward explained, after the formalities of the meeting had been dealt with, "first of all to settle the business of Nancy's marriage. My father promised to give ten thousand taels when she went to her new family, but he died so quickly that he had no time to do this."

"Yes, I know," said Ronald, "he told me about it and that he expected to pay this himself. But I can't do anything yet."

The woman interrupted with a demand from Edward as to what he was saying. She seemed suspicious and unwilling to let him proceed more than two or three sentences without having his words explained. Edward was visibly embarrassed.

"She wants that money now because that was promised and Nancy's new parents will be angry if they don't get it. It is more important than anything else."

"They will get it," said Ronald, "but I can't do anything just now. I can't touch a cent till your father's will is proved."

Edward did not understand this last sentence, so Ronald expressed his meaning at greater length.

"You see," he said, "your father was an Englishman, not a Chinese, and subject to English law. Even though he lived in Chinese style and kept Chinese customs, that makes no difference. His death must be reported to the British minister and all his papers have to be inspected, and his will, which tells how he wishes his money divided, this must be read and allowed. Before this is done the bank will not recognize me as his trustee and will refuse to pay me any money, no matter how many checks I choose to write."

The boy, still puzzled, did his best to explain these details to the t'ai-t'ai, but it was clear that she was not satisfied.

"She wants you to pay the ten thousand taels," Edward said, "then you can take it later from my father's money. She wants you please to do this—never mind about the other money; she can wait for that, but this money she must have, because Nancy's family will be very angry."

Ronald laughed.

"I haven't ten thousand taels," he declared, "or even half the sum—and am never likely to have. There is nothing else to be done. She will have to wait."

The t'ai-t'ai did not believe these statements. He was being polite. Of course he had ten thousand taels. What foreigner didn't have ten thousand taels? She returned again and again, in most tiresome pertinacity, to her request that Ronald pay this money at once, waving aside his most patient explanations as though she had never heard them. It was a strange thing, she remarked at last, that the wife of the dead man could not be trusted to dispose of his money: that a stranger had to be called in.

"But that's just the point," Ronald replied with much exasperation; "the t'ai-t'ai, whatever she may be in Chinese law, is no wife at all by English law. Mr. Herrick remained a British subject; he could not become Chinese legally, despite his wish to do so, and therefore, unless he married the t'ai-t'ai at the legation, which I very much doubt, she is no wife in English eyes. Just for that very reason he called me in to help, so that I could safeguard the interests of his family and see that they did not suffer through his death."

He succeeded at last, by Edward's faltering assistance, in driving these facts home. The t'ai-t'ai resigned herself to the existence of troublesome laws and to the more immediate point that her hopes of securing her money hung entirely on Mr. Nasmith's good offices. There would be no profit in making him angry.

"There is another thing," Ronald continued, when he saw that she was in a more amenable mood; "as a trustee, I feel especially responsible for Mr. Herrick's two English-born children. Of course I recognize that one of them, by her marriage, is now outside my control. But over Edward here I have been placed as guardian by the authority of his father. Naturally I expect him to come to my home, and I think when he does that you will understand that your responsibility for his future ceases."

The t'ai-t'ai had no objection to offer to this arrangement, which her husband some months before his death had explained to her. She certainly did not wish to be burdened with the problem of Edward.

"But to Nancy too," said Ronald, "I feel a sense of duty. I did not approve of her marriage and did my best to persuade her father against it. Personally I would have been willing, if he had died earlier, to offer the ten thousand taels just to set her free from what has always seemed to me an unjust engagement for a girl of her age. If my powers as trustee allowed of this,—I can't be certain, of course, that they did,—I would have taken this risk of disobeying her father's wishes. Well, it's too late to discuss that. Our ways, you see, and yours are different. A few years of Chinese education couldn't make Nancy a Chinese; I am sure of it. But she is married; that can't be mended; we have to make the best of it and I want to see that the best is made of it."

The t'ai-t'ai pricked up her ears at Edward's tactful translation of this speech. She wondered just what Ronald had in mind when he wished to see that the best was being made of Nancy's wedding. Ronald, however, explained himself further.

"I want to speak to Nancy herself," he said, "and have her own assurance that she is being well treated. I presume that she will be coming back to her father's house soon, won't she?"

"She has to stay three days with her husband," Edward took it upon himself to answer; "then the wedding will be finished and she can come here for a day. That is our custom. Even though our father is dead, they will not permit her to come before three days."

"And a nice home-coming it will be!" Ronald groaned. "A cheerful place to return to. Please tell the t'ai-t'ai that when Nancy returns I must be here to see her and speak to her. I don't know what the Chinese custom is in such a case, but this is absolutely necessary if I am to perform my duties as a trustee in a satisfactory manner."

Edward communicated this demand, to which the t'ai-t'ai gave a shrug of consent. There was nothing these foreigners appeared incapable of asking, but she was too wholly in the man's power. It was no time to quibble.

With this promise safely gained, Ronald told Edward to gather up his things. It was not healthy for the boy to stay a minute longer than necessary in a household where everyone's thoughts dwelt round the corpse of the dead master. Edward went to his work listlessly and came back sniffing and weeping after the woebegone task of dismantling the room he had occupied so long. Neither the sympathetic help of his amah cheered him nor the welcome of his new home, where David, awed by the distinction of one who had lost his father, tried cautiously to say the appropriate word. Edward wanted Nancy; his heart was hungering for her even when he thought he mourned for his father.

On the third day he went with his Uncle Ronald, as already he had been taught to call his guardian, to see the sister who had become a bride.

His own eagerness, if he had known it, did not exceed Ronald's. The intervening day had been a busy one. Ronald had been to the legation to have Herrick's will admitted to probate. He found friends who had known Herrick long ago and who were avid for every last detail of Herrick's story, but they could suggest no scheme for saving Nancy. It was a rotten business, they agreed with some emphasis, but a matter which could not be helped, for Nancy, by wedding a Chinese husband, had forfeited British protection. Ronald might use pressure, and they hoped he would, to get the girl away from her husband,—there was not one of them who expected the marriage to end in any way except drastic misery,—but he had no lawful right to divert any of Herrick's estate for the purpose. The estate, through remarkably clever investments, had once been close to a fortune, but recently Herrick's intemperate withdrawals had reduced it till it was barely enough to cover the terms of his will.

So Ronald went impatiently to meet Nancy, determined that if she gave him the slightest encouragement he would break all the laws of the land to rescue her. Early though he went, the bride had arrived before him and had given way to a frenzy of sorrow beside her father's coffin. She had not yet put on mourning, for the mother-in-law had deemed it an unlucky thing to interrupt the first festal days with any mark of sadness. So she had come, oddly enough, wearing a red skirt; but any suggestion of happiness had been erased by the stains of grief which made her eyes dull in their sunken pits and her skin a bloodless white.

It was the first chance Nancy had had to yield to her passionate misery: for three days she had struggled against tears, trying to preserve some semblance of joy in a family which paid no heed to the death of her father. The rites of the wedding were dragged out till she was on the point of fainting under the cruel burden. She felt no love for the husband who had been goaded into claiming her, and suffered bridal intimacies from one who became worse than a stranger in her eyes. Beneath his treatment she felt the hostility of a youth who had not desired this foreigner for his wife, and beneath the treatment she met from her new mother she felt the exasperation over delay in the payment of her dowry, disappointment taking unkind shapes because the woman had never forgiven herself for selling her son into what was likely to prove a bad bargain. For three days the family had been most deliberately merry, trying to face out their regrets in the sight of the world; they had been reckless of how they spent money, but thrifty of a single friendly word to the girl whose heart was breaking while she pretended to smile. At last they had let her go home to weep.

When Nancy, who had comforted herself before marriage with the hope of coming back to see her father, realized that he too had deserted her and that she had not won him a single day's peace by her sacrifice, she threw herself down beside his coffin and wept till her body seemed torn apart by her grief. Edward, who in his turn was ready to break down, understood the sudden need to control himself, so that when the time came he could comfort his sister in his affectionate boyish manner and bring her away to the room where Ronald was waiting.

Nancy was dazed at seeing Ronald. She did not seem to know why he was there. Her mind still lingered with her father. She had only perfunctory words to spare for the living, while Ronald could hardly check the temptation to carry her away by force, to carry her out of sight and sound of this baneful household. Everything he wanted to say froze on his lips. He had no heart to reproach the girl for persisting in the wedding she might have stopped. With her face marred by grief, he could not ask her if she were happy, if she were contented with her new home. The words would have mocked their own meaning.

"Nancy," he did at last summon courage to say, "it is no use weeping over the dead any more. It doesn't help them at all. If your father doesn't know, then your tears are wasted; if he does know, then he will be the more unhappy to see you so sad. The living are what we have to think of—you and Edward. If you want your father to have peace, wherever he has gone, you must help him not to worry over you. You must let him know that you have peace yourself. Edward he won't worry about because he asked me to take charge of him and so Edward has come to my sister's to live, but you every one of us will worry about till we are sure that you are well and happy. That's what you must tell me: you can speak as frankly as you choose; there is no one here who dares to interrupt, but I must know how I can help you."

"You can't help me," answered Nancy.

She was quieter now, but the hysterical stillness of her manner frightened Ronald.

"That is no answer," exclaimed Ronald.

He was annoyed by the girl's obstinacy, which she had inherited in too full measure from her father.

"You surely can be frank with me," he added, "because I may never again be in such a position to help you. You know that I have your father's estate to divide. As long as the money, which includes ten thousand taels which were to be paid at your wedding, as long as this remains in my hands I can make almost any terms you may wish with the t'ai-t'ai. But when it has been divided, then my power will be gone. Now do you regret your bargain? Are you sorry you kept to this marriage? Do tell me now, when I can help you."

He had realized Nancy's stubbornness; he had not measured her pride.

"My marriage is what I expected," she answered.

How could she tell him the shame of the last three days? How could she relate the scornful treatment of her new family? She might have told Kuei-lien; she had no words to speak of it to Ronald. She could not run to him like a weakling tired of her promise. To endure the mischances of her marriage was no more than keeping faith with her father's good name. She was a wife; that was the end of it. But Ronald seemed to read her thoughts.

"I don't know what your new home is like," he argued, "but I do know what you are like, and I can hardly imagine you happy under the conditions you will find there. Just now your sorrow for your father makes everything else seem of small account, but the time will come when the sharpness will wear off and you will have to think of the man you have married and the life you have adopted. For it is an adopted life; it is not natural to you. Now your father is dead, don't make a mistake of your loyalty to him and think you have to embrace years of misery merely to gratify his memory. That's not good enough. They don't want you—I can see that; they only want the money that was promised with you. Nothing would please them better than to get this money without the necessity of taking you. You are a foreigner and always will be a foreigner to them. Can't you come home with Edward and me, and I will promise, if I have to move heaven and earth, to get your marriage annulled."

"If they want my money, they have to take me," said Nancy stubbornly.

She was not doing justice to Ronald's proposal, while the man, in his turn, was far from seeing her marriage as she saw it. She could not appreciate how in his foreign eyes her marriage was no marriage, nor could he see how to her Chinese eyes it was a bond from which there was but one honorable escape for the wife, the extreme measure of suicide. Ronald had been reading deeply in the customs of the Chinese the better to understand Nancy's case, but he missed the essential fact of her attitude, the value she set by her good name. To have run away because she was displeased with her first three days of wedded life seemed an act of intolerable cowardice. Nancy's every thought was Chinese, more Chinese than Kuei-lien's: she had an inbred fear of disgrace, not only for her own sake but for her father's whose reputation rested helplessly in her care. So she met Ronald's most persuasive entreaties with the same blank answer. If she had grounds for quarreling with her husband or with his parents it was no business of an outsider to know of them.

At last Ronald despaired of moving her. He gave up the attempt. He was as sure as he was sure of his own love for the girl that she was unhappy in her new home and would grow week by week unhappier, but she was less responsive to his words now than before her marriage. He threw down his hands with a hopeless gesture, inwardly cursing the folly of Timothy Herrick, which was able to survive him in such fatuously obdurate wrong-headedness. Nancy's white, troubled face reminded him of his first glimpse of her in the temple. How much greater was her danger to-day than in that first perilous meeting. How much less he could help her. Unable to leave the girl without one sign of his deep overmastering passion, he crossed the room and kissed her gently on the forehead.

"I shall always love you, Nancy," he said.

Nancy trembled a little beneath the touch of his lips, but the kiss came so naturally that she had no time to be surprised and could only wonder long afterward at the trance which had held her silent under so strange a greeting, so strange a token of farewell.

CHAPTER XXX

Ronald did not see Nancy again until the day of Timothy Herrick's funeral. On that dreary day she was more remote than ever, wearing her headdress of white sackcloth and weeping loudly. Even Edward, who had thrown off many vestiges of his Chinese upbringing in the short time he had lived with the Ferrises, fell back disconcertingly into old habits and was as Chinese as Herrick's half-caste children when he had donned his coat of coarse bleached calico.

Ronald rightly insisted that as Herrick had lived so should he be buried, and he advised the t'ai-t'ai to spare none of the rites suitable to a mandarin of her husband's rank. He brought Beresford with him to the funeral. Beresford was intrigued by the many peculiar rites, but Ronald listened to it all with insufferable weariness and wondered if the priests were ever to be finished chanting their guttural prayers. Each stroke of bell and drum seemed to remove Nancy farther than ever from his hopes, tangling her spirit in an alien region from which she would never come out again. He saw nothing picturesque in the great scarlet catafalque put over Herrick's coffin, the silk umbrellas, the tables with their food for the dead, the spirit chair intricately wrapped in white muslin, the horrid crayon copy of Herrick's photograph, borne in a chair of its own, the bright silken copes of the priests, their contrast with the rags of the beggars, who carried white banners certifying to the merits of the dead, the green-clad coolies who labored with the weight of the coffin, the pervading smell of incense and burning sandalwood—these were all details which Ronald might have noted with an interested eye if he had not been oppressed by their meaning for Nancy. It was her tragedy that when those who loved her could bring the girl no comfort, she had to seek relief in this pitiless barbarity which seemed to sing her father's failure, his exile from his own people, his cheerless sojourn in the cold places of the dead.

All this Ronald heard in the weird music of the procession, as the coffin and its mourners moved slowly toward the gates of the city; he felt that the road Timothy Herrick was traveling, this same road there was no one to prevent his daughter from taking, despite all her lovable instincts for joy and for beauty—no one good enough to prevent her from following in her own desolate hour.

Beresford, however, thought the whole funeral very splendid. So much better, he declared, than being reminded of the skin-worms, and forced to linger in the sickly smell of a church which had been banked like a flower-seller's shop while bald-headed gentlemen trundled the coffin with exaggerated slowness up the aisle. He envied Herrick's escape from those absurd rites and from being consigned into eternity by the throaty reading of a curate in a starched surplice. This brilliant procession, winding with such an unrehearsed mixture of carelessness and dignity, did seem in his eyes to express more reasonably the tragic naturalness of death. Even Ronald, before they had reached Herrick's burial-place, began to feel himself haunted by the sobbing voice of the flutes and to know that this garish splendor was the ancient and simple way of keeping up man's courage before the mystery of death. It was a shock, on coming outside the city, to see the coffin stripped of its pall, the umbrellas and chairs sent back, as though the chief object of the parade had been not to honor the unseeing dead but to win honor from the populous streets of the city, yet the quiet which ensued induced meditations that were not unpleasing though they were sad. Autumn lay with warm sunshine on the land; sloping shafts of light made the dry grass glow; wide and blue was the sky. The only sound was the low-toned note of a gong which a priest rang from time to time as he walked in front of the coffin.

Ronald was moved by the loneliness of Herrick's burial-ground. It was so tranquil that he, too, half envied the dead man's privilege of sleeping quietly with all the scenes he had loved, the serene clarity of the Western Hills, the climbing palaces of Wan Shou Shan, the towers and golden roofs of Peking, compassing from the far distance the little circle of pine and cypress round the grave. Ronald's spirit was hushed by the stillness. The man looked idly at the four characters gilded on the end of Herrick's coffin: "Hai returns to the halls of spring," they said, and for the first time Ronald believed that there was immortality in lying here beneath the open spaces of heaven. A fresh outburst of wailing, the burning of paper money, and exploding of crackers could not touch the peace of a heart fortified by the strangely comforting thought that life was soon over.

The grave was ready at two, but the hour was even-numbered, unlucky; mourners and priests and workmen waited in little gossiping groups till the more fortunate hour of three, when the coffin was lowered into the grave with the lavish sunshine pouring down upon it as if to make amends for Herrick's last sight of day. Every clod that had been dug was thrown scrupulously upon the round mound of the grave. Edward knelt down and wept; Nancy wept and bowed her forehead to the ground; the women prostrated themselves, tearing their hair and their clothes. Ronald stood watching dumbly, but he got his moment of reward when Nancy rose, for she gave him one searching look, one glance of understanding and love, over which hovered the trembling flicker of a smile. She showed she had not forgotten his kiss; this was her answer. So completely, indeed, had Nancy seemed to belong to him throughout all the tedious hours of the funeral that Ronald remembered afterward, with some amazement, that among the gathering of the t'ai-t'ai's family, which followed the coffin, he had not knowingly set eyes upon or even thought of singling out Nancy's husband.

After Herrick had been buried, there was nothing to keep him from dividing what remained of his money. Ronald was anxious to be done with the task. He exacted but one promise, a promise from the t'ai-t'ai that when Nancy's first month of married life was complete and the girl, as custom allowed, was able to sleep a few nights under another roof than her husband's, she should come to his sister's home instead of the father's house she ought to have visited. This was reasonable, for Edward was the only kinsman left to her.

Herrick's pretentious household melted away. Each wife, when she received her money, took pains to put herself out of the t'ai-t'ai's reach. There was none of them that wished to be slave to that arrogant lady. With a contemptuous smile she watched them scatter. After they and their children and their bundles and bedding and their wrangling servants had gone, she gave up the lease of the house Herrick had occupied so long, sold what she could of his furniture, and betook herself to her brother's. Of the line her husband had been so ambitious to found, literally not even the name remained.

Ronald took care to obtain and note the t'ai-t'ai's address; Nancy's bridal month was so nearly finished that he could not govern his eagerness to have her come. The rest of Herrick's family he made no effort to trace. Except the amah, who of course remained with Edward, they might scatter to the winds for all he cared. But suddenly one evening when the Ferrises had finished dinner a hubbub in the kitchen woke them from the lethargy of worrying about Nancy, for Edward's presence among them had been a continual reminder of his sister's absence; they jumped up in alarm when the old nurse rushed gasping into the room, crying out, "They've gone, they've gone!" It took them some minutes to understand what she meant. Not till Kuei-lien appeared and rapidly poured out her story to Edward was the cause of the amah's excitement understood.

To their consternation they learned that the t'ai-t'ai had broken her promise. She had gone with her brother and his whole family back to their native town of Paoling. And Nancy, as naturally she must do, had gone with them. It was the last blow.

The other details of Kuei-lien's story were more interesting to Edward than to his discouraged guardian. The one fact which might have been of use, her coming from the same town as the t'ai-t'ai, was robbed of advantage because the girl did not dare nor intend to go home. If she had done so she would have been handed over to the t'ai-t'ai by her stupid and covetous family. She was the single one of Herrick's concubines whom his wife had tried to retain. Her parents were dependents of the Chou family, absolutely under their orders, while the t'ai-t'ai not only did not like losing a slave of Kuei-lien's beauty and cleverness but still more regretted letting her escape with the money she had gathered. Their separation had cost them a quarrel. The t'ai-t'ai had commanded the concubine to remain, had threatened to hold her boxes and to have the girl beaten. If Kuei-lien had been less bountiful in bribing the servants, she could not have got away. The t'ai-t'ai's stinginess had proved her safety.

So Kuei-lien, meditating new plans, lay low. She cultivated the friendship of the amah, husbanded the money she owned, while she looked for chances to get more. And because she maintained some slight connection with Pao-ling and might get them news of Nancy, the Ferrises were pleased to let her stay. They did not guess a tenth of her plans nor realize that she was using the shelter of their servant quarters to let it be known she was under foreign protection, that any offense offered to her would be visited upon the offender by the King and Parliament of Great Britain.

As for poor Nancy, the King and Parliament of Great Britain had lost interest in her. The secluded Chihli village of Paoling kept her as hidden from prying strangers as the fastnesses of Turkestan. Nancy had never been told of the promise that she should visit Edward in his new home. She was saved this disappointment. But she knew it was the last step away from her friends when her mother-in-law summoned her to pack and to get up long before dawn for the cold dark ride to the station. Long as she had lived in Peking, the city was a place strange and unfamiliar to the girl, yet she conceived a fondness even for the arches and walls she barely could descry in the darkness, for she felt she should never set eyes upon them again.

With the rest of her husband's family she bundled uncomfortably into a third-class carriage, squeezing herself so tightly between baskets and bedding that she sat as though cramped stiffly in a vise. Everyone spoke shrilly; the early hour, the bitterly frosty morning, had set their tempers on edge. No one was in a mood to enjoy the novelty of a railway ride. Nancy looked wearily at the dingy houses they passed, wondered if their occupants could be unhappier than she was; she saw in the distance the blue roofs of the Temple of Heaven, but paid no heed; if her legs had not been so stiff, her whole body aching from the need of movement, she might have gone to sleep counting the numbers of the telegraph poles. Her mind did go to sleep; her body persisted in staying painfully awake.

She was grateful to get off the train, grateful to shake her numb legs into life, pulling boxes and bales quickly out of the car. The t'ai-t'ai and her mother-in-law gave contradictory orders, they wrangled and shouted, pulling servants helter-skelter, scolding Nancy, scolding her husband; they were only one of many groups invoking heaven and hell in their panic lest the train should start before the last bundle had been rolled out of the window.

By a miracle they got themselves untangled and down to the platform, where the women sank breathless on rolls of bedding, waiting for a bargain to be struck with the mule-drivers. This was not quickly nor quietly done and Nancy, used to having these small matters arranged without her presence, despaired of its ever being done at all. To the mule-drivers and their opponents, however, the hiring of a cart was more heady business than speech in a public forum. Not till vulgar interest was diverted to Nancy, whose presence in this company became an eighth day's wonder, did the arguing parties see that their prominence of the moment had passed; they made the same bargain they could have made half an hour back. Chou hsien-sheng swore he was cheated, the drivers swore they were robbed, but the price they fixed had been the unchanging rate for a decade.

Nancy was glad to get into her cart, even to be thriftily crowded among three women servants and a suffocating mass of baggage. She had not enjoyed the ring of staring eyes which had surveyed her nor the coarse guesses of the people as to her history, guesses loudly and impudently debated with many rustic guffaws over the joke of a foreigner reduced to Chinese clothes and the whims of a Chinese master.

All day long the carts moved slowly forward, lumbering in ruts, shaking the teeth of their passengers on miles of chipped highway, ploughing deep through sand. Nancy was acutely mindful of other mule-cart journeys, the rides to the Western Hills, when Edward and Kuei-lien had been her comrades and each new turn of the road had tempted their eyes to objects of joyful interest. She was scornful of the ignorant maids squashed into this unpleasant contact, closed her eyes to avoid seeing their puffy faces; their few monosyllables were like a parody of human speech. They wheezed and grunted and reeked of garlic till Nancy wondered why she could not withdraw all her senses, as she had withdrawn her sense of sight, and shut herself from these clownish wenches like a mussel in its shell.

Shortly before dark the carts lurched down the sunken streets of Paoling. It was like all the other villages they had passed, dusty and poor. Dikes of baked mud served for walls. Two policemen lounged at the gate as though the place were not worth their vain offer of protection. Mud and gray tile and leafless trees, streets without shops, worn into deep trenches, people clothed in rags so dirty that the very patches were blended to a greasy uniformity of color—not an item relieved the drab scene. And the home of her husband, Nancy found, was a consistent part of its surroundings. It was filthy, musty, and cold, a huge ramshackle place replete with tottering chairs and tables, its stone floors overlaid with grime, its courtyards heaped with dung. Only rats and spiders seemed fit to inhabit such a place and Nancy's heart became chill with dismay when she thought of dragging out her life in this cheerless hole.

In a panic of sheer terror she was taken to greet Ming-te's grandmother, the matriarch of the clan, the old lady whose temper she had heard discussed with lively fear during the month she had been married. She shrank from being led to something more terrible than any of the evil things she had seen. Her nerves were so unstrung by the weariness and misery, the depressing finish of the day, that she was ready to shriek. She halted stock-still in a room ill lit by native wicks.

"Kneel," chided the voice of her mother-in-law.

Nancy knelt and kowtowed three times before the august personage to whose face she had not yet presumed to raise her eyes. She waited, prostrate on the floor.

"Lift her, you fools," cried a voice that showed by its testiness it was used to being obeyed. "Can't you see she is worn with weariness?"

The other women hastened to help Nancy to her feet. The girl looked wonderingly at the little old woman who sat muffled in quilted satin on the k'ang. From a face crossed and transcrossed with wrinkles burned eyes whose haughtiness spoke an older and a finer generation than the women to whom Nancy had been subjected. Her mother-in-law's were dog's eyes compared with them. Nancy lost her fear. The eyes brought memories of her father. They seemed to pierce, with their sadness, their cynical discontent, the very mysteries of life.

"Come here, my child," said the old woman gently. "Come and sit with me and tell me how you are. I have waited a long, long time to welcome you."

CHAPTER XXXI

In the first relief that followed this kindly greeting, Nancy nearly broke down. Tears welled to her eyes, do what she would to hold them back. She could not help sobbing, but the old woman stroked her hands as though she knew the misery pent up in the heart of this alien bride.

"My husband and your father were friends," she said, "and I am glad that his daughter has become my granddaughter. But it's hard, isn't it?"

She gave a little chuckle, seeming to appreciate her own experiences as a bride in years which only a handful of bent gray figures like herself still lived to remember. Nancy could have lived as long without forgetting this reception by the wise old woman whose harsh tongue she had been taught to dread. It came with such sudden, blinding beauty at the end of a comfortless journey, at the end of four suffering weeks in which her spirit had been tortured nearly to the limits of its endurance!

Nancy would have suffered much from the women, from her mother-in-law and from her stepmother—for the latter visited on the daughter her anger over the justice of Timothy Herrick's will—and even at the hands of lesser people, who took their pattern from this spiteful pair, but she had hoped for some measure of sympathy, some pity, even if there could not be love, from the youthful stranger, Ming-te, who had been given the rights of a husband over her life.

In this she was disappointed. Ming-te felt that there was no one with a grievance comparable to his own. His parents, however much they might dislike this foreigner in the family, had invited her by their own choice. But he had been given no choice.

Like most youths of his modern day, he detested being bound by an early marriage even to a girl of his own race; he detested being set to breed heirs for the pleasure of his parents. He envied the new laxities of Shanghai and Peking, the parody of Western freedom carried on under the guise of choosing one's wife for one's self. He was eager to push aside convention, to realize republican liberty by bursting all restraint; he was a student, member of a class bound by no laws of right or reason, to whom all things ought to be allowed in the pursuit of knowledge; yet just when his imagination had begun to run riot over the thought of embracing slim girl students to the mutual advancement of their studies, when he was becoming conscious of his own sacred importance as the hope of China and the flower of creation, he had been put under restraint like his forefathers, suddenly, brutally married, his hopes dashed. And his sacrifice had been unmentionably worse than theirs; he, the heir of the ages, had amounted to so little in the eyes of his elders that they had flung him a foreigner for a bride!

So Ming-te, the handsome, spoiled idol of his parents, took his marriage in bad grace and vented his spleen on Nancy. He did not take the trouble to see whether here might not be the ideal comrade of whom he had prated so freely in the safe company of his friends; he had made up his mind to dislike the girl long before he set eyes upon her. The disgrace of his bridal night, his sheepishness, the mockery of his family, of which he still heard the echoes, were an added score to be wiped out. And because he could not avenge himself on her mind he tried to avenge himself on her body, for at heart he was afraid of Nancy; at heart he realized her contempt for his shallowness and conceit; he seemed to see her eyes despising him as a weakling, a petulant small boy, till she challenged him to ecstasies of cruelty to prove that he was indeed her master.

Nancy had learned many undreamed-of things during this month, but nothing more dumbfounding than the fact that real sorrow is an experience without appeal; it has no glamour, no romance. It is like a headache which goes on forever. She wondered at the vernal innocent person she had been, blithely offering herself for a life of torture, as though it were no more than one of those tempestuous black tragedies of childhood which last for an hour, then ripple peacefully away like bird notes after a storm. It seemed so splendid to sacrifice herself, against the protests of Ronald and his nieces and Edward and Kuei-lien and even her father himself; she had been thrilled by her own daring even when her heart was cold with the prospect, so that, while she entered the bridal chair sad and afraid, longing to cling to everything she was forsaking, some small part of her could not forbear standing aside to gloat over the picturesque courage of her deed.

But she had been wakened too unmercifully from her dream; her vanity, so excusable, so childishly serious, broken by a punishment out of all justice to what it deserved. Her days of shyness were passing. She was putting off the bride to put on the shrew—in that hard-mouthed family no other role was safe—when her regrets for the folly of her sacrifice suddenly dissolved and her heart swelled with pride, with thankfulness, because she had kept faith with an old lady she had never met, who greeted her in the twilight of a gray day, saying, "I have waited a long, long time to welcome you."

The t'ai-t'ai and her sister-in-law were more surprised than Nancy. They were dismayed. What the old t'ai-t'ai said, she meant; she had come to an age when she did not trouble to hide her thoughts of other people, but ruled her clan, as the last of the oldest generation, with an unsparing frankness such as made them quail. Hers was a witty, biting tongue which she found life too short to think of bridling; she did not like her daughter, still less her daughter-in-law, thought none too highly of her sons, and, as for her grandchildren, she called them a litter of gaping puppies. Her mind was a catalogue of their faults; she could make the best of them wince with a single sharply prodding phrase, for there was nothing ridiculous that any of them had done, and wished with all his heart to forget, that she could not recall when the occasion suited her. Grown men writhed for a pretext to get beyond earshot of her chuckle.

Yet she did not welcome Nancy kindly—as the t'ai-t'ai and her sister-in-law concluded—merely to annoy them. Her instinct, which always was extravagantly right, had told her that Nancy would be a friend. She did not care whether Ming-te had a wife or not, but she longed for someone young, someone talented and pretty, to whom she could talk and be kind. Her own family bored her. She yawned when she thought of them. They were a small, petty-minded generation, while her memory dwelt upon the large days of the past. Her loyalty was all to the past, to her husband and his father, to the family in its time of splendor, before its name had been dragged in the dust by a progeny that forsook their books and squabbled over cash like beggars fighting in the street. So she had ruled them with a testy loneliness, glad to be alive only because she knew they would be glad if she were dead.

Her first glimpse of Nancy satisfied the keen-sighted old tyrant. She drew the pale girl to her side like a child.

"It's a long time since I've seen anyone really young," she said, "young and wise together as they used to be. Now we have a republic; men don't trouble about wisdom and they think they can rule the eighteen provinces before they have left off their mother's milk. You have read books, I have heard, and can write poems. Your father would see to that. He knew our customs. He was one of us."

She could be tactful when she chose; in her questions about the death of Nancy's father she soothed rather than irritated the quick feelings of the daughter.

"To die on the day of your wedding, ai, that was a strange thing. I have lived many years, but I have never heard the like. That was a proof that he loved you, my child. You must remember such a father. And you have a brother, too; where is he?"

Nancy told the story of Edward's friends.

"So you have Western friends. How did you come to make them?"

Paragraph by paragraph she drew from Nancy's lips the tale of how they had met and visited the Ferrises. The old lady enjoyed the freshness of the girl's story. She wanted most exact details of how these foreigners lived.

"It must have surprised them to see one of their own blood living in the fashion of a Chinese. Did you like their ways?"

"Sometimes," Nancy admitted.

"Do you like our ways better?"

Nancy was surprised at the question and reluctant to answer.

"Perhaps—sometimes," suggested the old grandmother, answering herself, and turned to laugh at the shadow of the smile Nancy could not hide.

"Don't be afraid of me," she said, patting the girl's hand from pleasure at her own jest. "I shall be your father and your mother from this time forth—hm-m, just like a magistrate, remember. You can tell your troubles to me as freely as you please and, even if the walls have ears, they won't dare speak till I let them."

Her words lulled Nancy into a pleasing warmth of security. She forgot her weariness, the despair with which she had risen this very morning to start on a hopeless journey, for the old t'ai-t'ai's words were spoken with the authority of one who could promise peace when she wished and protection to those she liked. And she really liked Nancy.

"Your Western friends," she resumed, "they must have been appalled by your marrying a Chinese. Did they try to dissuade you?"

"Yes, they did try."

"Ah, of course, they wouldn't understand. And perhaps they were right. You may go back to them some day; who knows?"

"Oh no, I shall never go back to them," Nancy protested, dreading lest the woman should doubt her loyalty to the promise she had made.

"Young people, my daughter, should never use the word 'never.' When you are as old as I am and have to think soberly of the spring winds as not just a chance to fly kites, then 'never' means something; ah, it means too much. There is so much happiness I shall never know again, so many faces I shall never see. But you, with your handful of years, there is no 'never' for you. You thought to-day you would never smile again. You had heard of me, hadn't you, and trembled to meet a bad-tempered old grandmother; don't deny it—I saw it in your face when they made you kneel. I shall not be bad-tempered to you, child. We old people like to have flowers about us. I shall be selfish of your company and most surely will begrudge you to others. And will you be sorry? Aha, I don't think you will. Your father must have taught you wisely for you remind me of children as they used to be when I was young. I am tired of being waited on by servant maids or by people who wonder when I'm going to die. Why should I die just to make fools more comfortable in their folly! No, I shall not be bad-tempered to you, because you are the first person I have had round me for years who really wished me to live. But I'm not going to share you."

How firm were her intentions was soon shown, for Nancy's mother-in-law came in to say, in a voice too carefully matter-of-fact, that if the old t'ai-t'ai had been gracious to say all she wished to the 'hsi-fu,' they hoped she would give her permission to withdraw, for there was much work to be done and her room to be set right.

"And whose work, indeed, is she to do, if not mine?" asked the old t'ai-t'ai. "Her room we can discuss later, but to-night her room will be here."

"Oh, but that would not be convenient," faintly protested the younger woman; "we must not separate the bride from her husband. My mother speaks this out of her kind heart, but surely it would make my mother uncomfortable."

"It will be entirely convenient," snapped the dowager.

"Very well, that is only what we wished to be sure of," said Ming-te's mother hastily, "we wanted to make sure of your comfort."

Yet the next day she was still so far from being satisfied of the old t'ai-t'ai's comfort that she asked her sister-in-law to intercede and to get Nancy out of the old lady's clutches before it was too late. Hai t'ai-t'ai, Nancy's step-mother, was more than ready to try, for she knew that while the old lady lived, if they did not make a stand quickly, Nancy would be lost to their control. She had a portion of her mother's independence and did not cringe in the august presence as her sister-in-law was apt to do. Waiting a chance when Nancy was absent, she went boldly into the den.

"You have come to ask after my health, have you?" inquired her mother brusquely. "My health is excellent, this morning. It has done me great good to meet someone new.

"We are so glad that the foreign hsi-fu meets with your favor," lied the daughter cheerfully. "I thought of your comfort when I began to arrange the match."

"Did you? Well, you thought most intelligently, so intelligently that I have decided to keep her as my companion, to give her the room next to mine."

"Your companion, by all means," agreed Hai t'ai-t'ai, "but not too much your companion. We can never permit her to tire you with her prattle. She might become spoiled and think you were indulging her in liberties only fit for yourself. I have known her for many years and I speak the truth when I say she is difficult to control. She puts forward a good face at first, but she is an obstinate, self-willed child, not always obedient to her elders. Her training was sadly neglected because she was left to the charge of an indulgent old amah—"

"And you think her training will suffer at my hands, do you?" interrupted the old t'ai-t'ai with a laugh, "you fear that I will be another indulgent old amah to her?"

"Oh no, not at all, but we trembled to put the burden of her training in your hands."

"You are all very busy people. What is there for an old woman like myself to do? I shall be happy to take the burden of her training into my hands. When I weary of it, I have a tongue; I can tell you."

The daughter shrugged her shoulders. Nancy always had been a mischievous obstacle to her plans; and now, with her new ally, was more dangerous than ever. Her hands itched to beat the wench. But she went on in smooth tones:—

"We must be just to Ming-te."

"I am just to Ming-te."

"But he has had his bride only for a month. Is it right to leave the boy lonely without a mate for his bed? These things mean so much to the young. If he is lonely, he may go out to drink and to gamble with evil companions. He did not want to marry, yet for our sake he did even more: he married a foreigner to help his family. And now, when he is beginning to understand her excellent qualities—"

"Self-willed and obstinate," reminded the t'ai-t'ai.

"To understand her excellent qualities," continued the daughter, as though she had not heard the interruption, "and is beginning to appreciate her for his wife, you surely would not reward his unselfishness by taking her away and making her a stranger to him. What of the future of the family? How will they learn to live together in peace and harmony like—"

"Like a sparrow and a phœnix," suggested the mother wickedly. Hai t'ai-t'ai flushed in annoyance, but the dowager stopped her from speaking.

"How will they learn to live together in peace and harmony?" she echoed. "Ah, my daughter, you are old enough to answer that question, or must I answer it for you and say they never will learn. If you could have got fifteen thousand taels without this girl, would you have taken her? No, indeed not. But I would have taken her without a cash. So she belongs to me. She will never be of any use to this family because I am the only one who knows how to use her. And I am old—and I have no husband to give her. She will be safer with me. If Ming-te wants a bedfellow, get him one. You can afford to spend on him a little of the money he has earned. Buy him a nice, good-tempered, pretty wife; the country is full of them. He will be happy, you will be happy, and I shall have peace."

CHAPTER XXXII

Nancy returned to find the formidable old t'ai-t'ai crowing over her triumph. To outwit her daughter was always tonic which put new life in her veins.

"Can you choose between your husband and me?" she asked, with her usual terrifying directness.

Nancy knew the time for a straight answer.

"I can choose," she replied.

"Bravely spoken," said the old lady in her glee, "you are too clever to be a mere bedfellow."

Nancy saw what was coming next but waited carefully so as not to miss her cue in this game of frank riddles.

"Have you seen your husband's room?"

"I have seen it."

"And what do you think of this room next to mine?"

The woman pointed to an open door. Nancy followed her indication and looked into a neat bare chamber, scoured cleaner than most of the apartments in this dilapidated house.

"The air is better here," she said smiling.

The lao t'ai-t'ai beamed with approval of her words.

"All said neatly in a phrase, as a scholar ought to say it," she thought to herself, "not a breath of complaint about her husband, not an undutiful syllable, and yet the whole story clear as the sun."

"Ai, my daughter," she said, "that is to be your room. Your wit would be wasted anywhere but here."

At the command of her mistress Nancy brought her things. She was astonished by the readiness of the other women to help her and not much daunted by their advice.

"My mother is an old woman," warned the stepmother, holding Nancy by her scowling voice, "and like all old women, much given to strong fancies. At the moment her fancy is for you and, because she may not live long, it is our natural duty to humor her. Your parents-in-law and your husband of course have agreed to this and we expect you to obey her in everything she asks and to make her comfortable, whatever the cost to yourself. But do not forget that an old woman's words are many and her memory is brief, and that while she may condescend to honor you as her companion and to say kind things to you, that gives you no excuse to be proud or to think that you are better than the rest of us. She is the head of the family; she can say what she chooses; but you are still the least of us, you have to wait your time of authority, like every person of your years, and if you let your head be turned by an old woman's flattery, then the day will come—and it may come soon—when you will have bitter lessons to learn at our hands and at the hands of your husband. I tell you this because you have been spoiled too much already; you have been indulged by your father and made a little god by a maudlin old nurse, and it would be a pity if the training we have started to give you had to be repeated with a stick merely because my worthy old mother cannot curb her passion for new faces."

Usually Nancy was cut to the quick by the malice of these speeches, but she could afford not to be angry with words which had no power to back them. There was the threat of the future indeed,—her parole hung upon the precarious life of the old dowager,—but a future threat was better than a present one. The bride was sufficiently grateful for her good fortune of the moment not to worry over her stepmother's brandished cudgel.

And for once the cudgel had been brandished more from habit than from active spite. Nancy's stepmother, in fact, had abundant reason to be content, for the old t'ai-t'ai out of her own lips had suggested a plan her daughter had been revolving in her mind, the purchase of a Chinese wife for Ming-te. She had half promised the youth a solace for his ill-sorted marriage, but it was a difficult subject to broach so soon after his wedding. Nancy might be obstinate and make trouble; the dowager, in a contrary mood, might block it. Herrick's widow was eager to inflict on the daughter the jealousy she had suffered from the father's roving desires; she planned further to help this concubine into Nancy's place till the real wife should become little better than a servant. And now, wonderfully enough, the old t'ai-t'ai, who had to be led so warily like a balky mule into every project, had blessed the scheme by proposing it from her own mouth. She was, in fact, saving her daughter much strain by breaking it to Nancy.

"I am borrowing you, heart and body, from your husband," she said; "we can quickly find a substitute for you."

"A substitute?" asked Nancy.

"Yes, a substitute to take your place by his side. If I steal you, it is only fair that he should be given another wife in your place."

"Then I don't have to go back to him?" inquired the girl with hope in her voice.

The old lady smiled.

"That was an unguarded question," she said. "I fear you are not properly disturbed at dividing your husband's affections with another. No, my child, while I live I think you will not have to go back to him. You must pray for me daily to the god of long life, for after I die—ah, we can't discuss that now. But don't you mind another bride for your husband?"

"I know that I am an unworthy match for your grandson."

"Pooh! You know nothing of the sort; don't trouble to speak in this grand manner to me. I didn't make my grandson and I am very humble about taking credit for his amiable qualities. If you had been a worthy match for Ming-te then you would never have been worthy to entertain me in my dotage. But you are still his wife and you need not efface yourself from this privilege. The new woman, whoever she may be, will be your servant as well as his and you must teach her to mind you from the first. These jades are often headstrong and they hide many a pleasant ambition under their black hair."

"I will not hinder her," said Nancy, a little sadly, though she was glad that her release from Ming-te promised for months, perhaps for years, to be so complete. She had no tender feelings for her husband, none but impulses of aversion and shame, and yet she was sad because already she seemed to see her father's splendid dream go toppling, and the Chinese marriage of his daughter fast becoming no marriage at all.

"That is not a shrewd policy in this family," observed the lao t'ai-t'ai; "you should always hinder everything. What will you do when I die?"

"I don't know what I shall do when you die. I shall not care much what I do."

"Ha, you are the only member of the family who has not laid plans for that grateful event. Even the pigs, I dare say, have disposed of the warmest parts of this chamber to rest their snouts. But never mind, we must plan that you shall not be the loser for helping me. You are staking more than you know on the choice you have made to-day."

The lao t'ai-t'ai left the subject with this vague promise. Nancy's trouble passed like a cloud; she trusted the power of her aged mistress to defend her from evil, recognizing the wisdom that drew from a fund of experience, to provide against hazards she herself saw but darkly, yet in the back of her mind still lurked a sense of pity because her marriage to Ming-te was being confessed a failure so quickly. She could not stamp out a smouldering jealousy when she saw her place being given to another and knew that her husband of a month remembered her costly sacrifice without one tender thought.

Soon the household was aflame with new plans. To take a concubine, of course, was not to take a wife. The same ceremonies could not be used: there could be no scarlet chair, no procession, no worship of heaven and earth. But everything short of full nuptial rites was proposed to give dignity to Ming-te's second wedding. Nancy could not move through the house without feeling that this, in the eyes of the family, was the real wedding and that they grudged her the few empty privileges of the wife, as though she had stolen them. On this bride they were putting their hopes, from her body they wanted Ming-te to beget sons, not from the foreigner, whose half-caste children could only be the living occasions for explanation and apology.

Hai t'ai-t'ai was as swift in forwarding this wedding as Nancy's, and, because there were no middlemen to be bargained with or gifts to be exchanged, she could soon promise the arrival of the bride whom she personally had chosen and fetched from Peking. On a sharp November day the girl arrived. The house was crowded to receive her, for all the members of the family, the neighbors, the friends, who had been unable to go up to the capital for Nancy's wedding, made the most of this second event and feasted loudly and joyfully at the expense of their hosts. Nancy stood quietly to receive the homage of her new servant. She said nothing at the feast and ate little, listening to the talk of those round her like the stranger she was. She could not help noticing how they held aloof as though they did not regard her as one of themselves. Their eyes were upon the newcomer who had displaced her, and Nancy looked too, admitting her pretty face, her dainty figure, the quick, frightened intelligence of her eyes, thinking so vividly of her own bridal day that she was ready to take the girl by the hands and call her sister.

But she failed of courage to do this. This girl, after all, was being received as a friend whereas she had been received as an enemy. The contrast was too bitter. Nancy sat out the feast to the end, she tried to abide the amusement of putting the bride to bed, lest they should hint that she was jealous, but she knew again, now that people neglected her, as she had learned with such a shock when they mocked her, that she was an alien and had no place among them. Everyone was so unfeignedly happy to-day. Ming-te did not need to be made drunk to desire his new bride. She had been cheated of this happiness. Her thought ran to her father's couplet about the sun and the moon; she had a sudden desperate longing for Ronald, for the gay, secure life of the Ferrises; she could not stand the tumult round her any longer, but fled to her dark room to hide her misery.

It might have been for hours that she wept before a hand touched her.

"Why do you care?" she heard a voice softly asking her.

Nancy looked round to see the lao t'ai-t'ai, black against the light from the next room. She stood up, ashamed to be caught weeping, remorseful at having neglected her mistress.

"Do you care?" asked the old lady.

"No," said Nancy.

"Hm-m, I didn't think you did."

The girl started to get out bedding for her mistress and help her prepare to sleep, but the woman stopped her.

"I am not ready to sleep," she said.

Her eyes burned with an unslumbering vitality Nancy had not seen before; everything they had looked upon in their seventy years seemed to be passing in review; they quickened with the pride of one who has held her own sway over time. Nancy stood spellbound before the dignity of this ancient woman who used to attend the Eastern Empress herself a whole fifty years ago; in satin and gold she was regal, but it was still her eyes which could not be forgotten, making Nancy believe there were no secrets she could not read, no mysteries she could not understand, when she brought to bear upon her own tear-blanched face the sympathy of one who has walked deep and richly through experience. From those far-off glittering days she seemed to look back at Nancy and to know why she had been weeping.

"Those tears were not for Ming-te," she said quietly.

"No, they were not for Ming-te," Nancy confessed.

"Why did your father wish to marry you to him? Were there no others? Or did he become tired?"

"He became tired," answered Nancy, scarcely knowing what she said.

"Ah, that is our weakness when we become old. We do grow tired of searching out the equal of our hopes. We have been doing it in vain for so many years that at last we think the search is useless—and then we make our mistakes. If your father had sat here to-day, he would have known that you do not belong here, not with these people."

"I belong nowhere," cried Nancy in despair.

"You don't belong with sheep and donkeys."

The old woman sat meditating. Then she smiled.

"I suppose there are sheep and donkeys the whole world over," she reflected. "Your father thought his own people were sheep and donkeys and I think mine. No, my child, you don't belong to them and you can't always belong to an old woman like me because I am old and you are young. Why were you weeping?"

"Because I was lonely and miserable," said Nancy, surprised by the abruptness of the question.

"Lonely, yes, of course, the wise are bound to be lonely. But you cannot be lonely yet. You are too young."

"I am not lonely with you," Nancy declared.

"Ha, my child, you have a way with the old. You flatter old bones like mine. But you are not yet twenty and I am seventy. I shall keep you with me; I cannot give you up. But when they carry me out to the hills there will be no place here for you. Don't you see what I have been doing?—what they have been doing too?—making it impossible for you to live here. I came here a stranger too, like yourself; ai, that was long ago. My home was in the south where it is warm and the bamboos foam up the mountain sides, but not here—" With a gesture she pictured the bleak Chihli plains, drab, leafless country which the north wind is in a desolate hurry to leave behind. "Not here—and I don't wish you to get used to the smell of horse-drench and the braying of asses. You might have got used to it, ah, that's the pity, but you never can now, for there is no place for you here. You will never be the head of this family. Ming-te has a new wife; she is your servant, yes, but the servant will become the mistress. They don't tell me that; they think I don't guess their plans; bah, they think I can live so long and be blind; but if they came to me and consulted me openly I would tell them that it is not their plan but mine."

She paused for a minute. Nancy groped for the meaning hid behind this roundabout speech.

"Why were you weeping?" suddenly asked the old t'ai-t'ai, catching her quite off her guard. Nancy did not dare to reply because she knew too well why she had been weeping. The distant music, the fear of being left alone in this dreary household after the old t'ai-t'ai had died, revived the longing for Ronald's protection; just when the thought filled her heart the abrupt question trapped the girl. She blushed, as though her shrewd old protector had detected the wish itself.

"You too, my child, hide things from me," playfully scolded the lao t'ai-t'ai. Then she surprised the girl by another quick turn. "Did your father ever ask for you a husband of your own race? Ming-te was an afterthought, you know and I know. Come, you needn't be embarrassed; a person of my years can discuss these things. We make our own laws when we have lived long enough."

"How did you know what my father did?" exclaimed Nancy.

"You yourself have just told me," laughed the woman. She smoothed Nancy's hair with the gentle masterful hands which always radiated such warm feelings of safety, quelling doubt and uneasiness till the girl shut her eyes as if she were sinking asleep in a pleasant bed. "But I didn't need you to tell me," she continued, "for I knew your father's nature and I know yours. Your father was a better Chinese than most of us; he was a scholar; he was a gentleman; the old customs were at his finger tips. But he couldn't unmake himself and he couldn't unmake his daughter, and when you grew old enough to be married his heart must have lost much peace. He never wanted you to marry Ming-te. He had found and lost another husband for you."

"How did you know these things?" cried Nancy again.

"Didn't he?"

"Yes," confessed the girl.

"Aha, my daughter, now I do truly know why you were weeping. You obeyed your father when he didn't want you to obey him. I have heard your story and much more than you thought you were telling me with your lips. We old people can't sit on the k'ang all day watching the strange things men do without seeing many things they think they have hidden. But I have marveled at you. No daughter ever honored her father as you have done. Not a word of complaint, not an unmannerly sentence have you spoken, not a breath against Ming-te or these women who persecuted you. This would be a splendid family, a glorious family indeed, if it were fit for a daughter like you. But it isn't. You don't belong here. You and I should have been young together. Those were days when men understood. What does a republic make us? Sheep and donkeys! No, you don't belong here; and when I die I will send you where you do belong. Tell me about the husband your father first chose for you."

"I have told you," said Nancy, carried out of her embarrassment.

"Tell me what your father said of him."

Nancy, in her excitement, struggled to pull out a piece of paper which she wore like a talisman.

"This is what my father wrote for him," she explained.

The old lady took the paper as though she had expected it. She held it close to the smoking wick by her bed and read it twice or three times.

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.

"Ah, my child," she said, after reading it slowly, "we should have burned incense before we dared to read this. We were wrong, wrong, to disobey these words. They are the mandate of heaven itself."

Nancy stood in a trance. From far through the house came the noise of laughter and music.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Kuei-Lien more than justified her connection with the Ferris household by the news she was able to bring. Not so long after Nancy herself, Ronald knew that Nancy's husband—he made a grimace every time he used the word—was to take a second wife. He was pleased. Any barrier between Nancy and Ming-te warmed his own hopes and, from the liberal store of gossip which Kuei-lien got from Paoling, it seemed that there were real barriers of distrust between the young couple. Nancy, he learned, had become the attendant of the old grandmother, "a terrible old woman," Kuei-lien volunteered. This was not such good news except that serfdom to the old t'ai-t'ai saved her from bondage to the rest of the family, for the old lady, declared Kuei-lien, was very jealous of those who waited upon her, kept them always in sight, always ready to obey her uncounted whims. Nancy would have few chances to see her husband. Ronald made Edward translate every phrase of Kuei-lien's voluble information, seeking what hints he could to guide his own course of action.

"How long will things go on like this?" he demanded.

Kuei-lien shrugged her shoulders.

"I am not a fortune-teller," she said; "it will go on till the old t'ai-t'ai dies, at least."

"And if the old t'ai-t'ai dies?"

"Then she will be free to wait upon her mother-in-law."

Kuei-lien smiled, but Ronald saw what she told was likely.

"Do you think she is happy?" he asked.

"She must be very stupid to be happy in such a place. Hm-m," she grunted, "I know the family. Very quarrelsome they are and they will quarrel with her and make her a servant because they didn't want her. They only took her because of the money. They show they don't want her, else why should they get a new wife so soon? They want Chinese children. They will try to give this woman first place."

"Then what hope is there for Nancy?" Ronald inquired desperately.

"Oh, she can jump into a well. The wells at Paoling are quite salty, but they are deep."

Ronald was out of patience with Kuei-lien's grim humor.

"Couldn't she run away?" he suggested.

"Yes, she could run away, but they would soon follow. Where could she fly to? She has lived behind walls all her life; she doesn't know whether Peking is east, west, south, or north, and if she asked—ha, then she would be discovered. Chinese girls don't walk through the country asking their way to Peking."

Ronald was growing more and more restive under the restrictions of custom which kept him from seeing Nancy, although he knew no obstacle could stop him, were it not for the obstacles she herself would make. But he felt the need to move, to do something, no matter how useless it might be.

"I must go there," he said. "Are there any foreigners in Paoling?"

"Yes, there is a foreign doctor at the hospital. Perhaps there are others, but they cannot help you. The Chou family has nothing to do with missionaries. You would see the front gate; that is all. A beggar can see as much."

Nevertheless Ronald decided to go. Classes did not stop till January, but he found out the names of the foreigners who lived in this isolated town, got letters to them, and set out on the first of his holidays with no definite plan except that it was better to be moving than to sit at home with arms folded. The weather was bitterly cold. The miserable train depressed his spirits. But even that was luxury compared to the mule cart in which he jolted all day. The country was like a frozen desert; the cart slipped and plunged and nearly overturned in deep icy ruts. If he could get Nancy out of a land like this, Ronald vowed, never would he venture into it again.

The doctor and his wife, having been informed of his coming, were glad to welcome him. They thawed his stiff limbs before a great stove. His visit interested them the more because they had heard of a foreign woman hidden in one of the Chinese families of the town. The wife, especially, was sympathetic over every detail of Nancy's story. But neither of them could think of any way to see the girl.

"These places are barred to us," the doctor explained, "except when someone is very ill. Then, when the patient has been mauled and mishandled, plastered with dirty paper and stuck with infected needles, they call us in to undo the mischief of the Chinese doctors."

Just as if to give point to this remark, a servant came in with a card and a request that he come at once to attend a sick woman.

"Chou Hu-wei," mused the doctor, reading the card; he turned abruptly to Ronald. "There is witchcraft in this," he said, "this is the very same family you were seeking. I expect it's the old t'ai-t'ai herself—didn't you say it was she that the sister of your young friend was attached to? Yes, she must be the one. These January winds snuff out old lives. Ah, dear me, Paoling is not a place to grow old in."

It was the old t'ai-t'ai, the doctor found, and little chance of life he gave her. He read her case at the first glance and knew that the winds had done their work.

"Pneumonia—just what I feared," he said to himself.

The urgency of the case, the need of clearing out curious hangers-on and of getting ventilation to relieve the fumes of charcoal braziers so fully busied him that it was an hour before he could pause to notice the help he had been given by a foreign girl in Chinese clothes. The patient was as comfortable as she could be, lying sleepless but fully conscious, like one determined to die with her mind ruling to the last, not in the craven manner to let death sneak upon her when she was senseless. Nancy stood by her side, but with the same rigid control over her nerves.

"I expected to find you here," said the doctor. "Only to-day a visitor has come from Peking, a Mr. Nasmith—ah, you know him, I see; he is your brother's guardian. He came especially to find out whether you were well."

"What does he say?" asked the t'ai-t'ai, letting no movement escape her vigilant eyes, even in her pain, so that Nancy's start at Ronald's name gave her the hint that something weighty had been said.

"He says that the man whom my father first chose for my husband has come to Paoling," answered Nancy.

"Ah, it is fate," exclaimed the t'ai-t'ai. "I know now my time is finished. I will die. You must not wait for me, child. You must go back to him."

At these words Nancy's endurance crumpled.

"No, no, no," she cried, "you must not die! What can I do if you die? I don't want to go back. I want to stay with you. Don't let her die," she begged the doctor, forgetting, so excited she was, to speak English.

She fell down beside the bed and hid her face in her hands.

"I am not your sun, child," said the old woman softly; "you must not grieve for me. Of course I must die, but I shall take these words of yours with me; I shall not need any other sacrifice. They will burn money and houses and servants and weep on my grave till the sand has scoured the name from my stone, but I shall pay no attention to any of these; I shall always hear your words and smell them like burning sandalwood."

But Nancy would not be comforted. She jumped up again and faced the doctor with glowering eyes.

"You will not let her die, will you?" she demanded.

"Come, come, child, keep up your courage," said the doctor in his steadiest tones, "we won't talk of dying yet. You do your part and I will do mine."

He diverted her attention with many precautions about the care of the patient and about keeping the room free from intruders, while all the time the old t'ai-t'ai listened with a smile on her lips as though she deemed they were taking many needless pains.

"I have seen the girl you were looking for," he told Ronald, when he had come home again, "and you can set your heart at rest about one thing; she has not been ill-treated by the old t'ai-t'ai she is serving. I don't know what her relations with the rest of the family may be; I can guess that they have not been happy. But as to her feelings for the old t'ai-t'ai—well, I have been beside many deathbeds and I have never seen such an outburst of grief and love."

He detailed the scene exactly as it had happened before his eyes. Ronald was puzzled. He had heard such evil things about Nancy's aged mistress, such harsh pictures had been painted by Kuei-lien's vivid tongue, that he could not think of her as anything but an enemy.

"You say she told Nancy not to wait but to come to me?"

"That certainly was what I gathered. I have been twenty-five years in China; I don't often mistake words as clear as hers."

Ronald groaned.

"I wonder if she is going to sacrifice herself once more, just to please this old woman," he exclaimed.

The doctor had been moved by his impression of Nancy's love and also by the quiet dignity with which the sick woman bore her illness. He was a little out of patience with Ronald's remark, which sounded both hard and selfish.

"It seems foolish to you, no doubt," he said testily, "but more of her spirit would not be bad for the world. She knows her duty and is going to do it, no matter what you or I choose to say, and she thinks her old mistress is worth the sacrifice. For my part, I say more power to her arm. Pluck like that is not going to lose in the end."

"Yet the old t'ai-t'ai is going to die, isn't she?" asked Ronald.

"I should say, yes. She is very ill and pneumonia doesn't spare people at her age. But of course there is no certainty in these matters. Your friend might make her live—I have seen miracles like that before—if it were not for the fact that the old lady quite evidently thinks it is time to die and has made up her mind to die. The Chinese will do that, you know, when they grow old; sometimes their families suggest it to them because they have become feeble and a nuisance. That's a side of filial piety we don't hear advertised. But when they make up their minds to die, when they deliberately set themselves to give up the ghost,—I knew one old man who passed in ten days from sound health to the coffin,—when they do that, they are past praying for. I doubt if this old woman will live for all the doctors in the world. She seems to think she can help your friend by dying now."

"But if she dies, how will Nancy fare with the rest of the family?"

"Hm-m, I don't think she expects a very cordial time. Probably it will be spear against buckler, as the Chinese say."

"It was extraordinary," Ronald observed, beginning to pick up one by one the astonishing details of what the doctor had heard, "it was extraordinary that the t'ai-t'ai should have told Nancy to come to me."

"It was extraordinary indeed. I have never heard the like. For one of her position—in the husband's family, mind you—advising a hsi-fu to run away, that's absolutely without precedent. I don't understand it, however much she may like your friend Nancy. Of course her being a foreigner makes a big difference; the family is surely not keen on a foreign wife,—that second marriage, done so soon, proves that,—but they took her with their eyes open and they would not relish the poor compliment of her running away. Did her father, by the way, ask you first to be this girl's husband?"

"Yes," acknowledged Ronald.

"You didn't tell me that, you know. Were you engaged to her?"

"No."

"Well, your being here has become, for some reason, very important in the old t'ai-t'ai's eyes. Perhaps you can untangle it."

Ronald thought he could, though he did not trouble the doctor with his reasons, for the latter was ready for bed and said frankly that daylight solved more puzzles than lamplight. The t'ai-t'ai had made a curious remark about the sun. This gave the lover his cue; he lay awake nearly till daybreak going back and forth over scenes of the past: the importance Herrick ascribed to the scrolls he had written; Nancy's surprise when she saw them; the indication that the t'ai-t'ai knew of them. The sentences danced in his brain till he became afraid of them. Herrick must have trafficked with black art when he wrote those lines. They were always promising him Nancy, always withholding her.

At times he felt like copying the passive manners of the East and sitting, hands in lap, waiting for the prophecy, if prophecy it were, to fulfill itself, but his restless Western blood would not keep him still. The excitement of having Nancy so near, of almost having been given her by the unlooked-for command of the t'ai-t'ai, this was too urgent for sleep. Perhaps the old woman would die to-day, and Nancy would come. His fingers ached to pull away the curtain of these next few hours. He dared not hope too much. If that evil family hid her away again, he was ready to drag down their sagging house round their ears.

Hour after hour struck from the clock beneath his bedroom. He wondered whether Nancy were standing vigil over the dying woman whom he envied because she loved. If only he could keep vigil with her!

CHAPTER XXXIV

The strokes of the clock came too quickly for Ronald. They woke him each time just when he was drowsy, telling him that it was two, three, four, and he was not yet asleep. The clock struck more slowly for Nancy. She sat alone in the sick room; she was absolute mistress here; the orders of the doctor, the t'ai-t'ai's imperious will, which was as strong as ever in its effect upon the family, supported the girl in her right to keep the room clear.

"I want no snivelling humbugs in here," said the implacable old lady.

Apart from making polite inquiries, the others were glad to leave Nancy the burden of the sick chamber. She sat in quiet, broken only by the hard breathing of the patient, who was also awake. She was not tempted to doze. There were too many puzzles of her own to unravel. Her fortunes hung in the balance again, with the fortuitous coincidence of Ronald's arrival in Paoling and the t'ai-t'ai's sudden, withering illness. She wished Ronald had not come. She was afraid of the sign, connecting it, as did the old t'ai-t'ai herself, with her death. And she had wanted so grievously to be left, if only for a few months, in the peace which had come since her protector had extracted her secret of the sun and the moon.

She was in the mood which her father had surprised long ago when he asked his daughter to whom he should marry her and she shirked the question, saying that she did not wish to be married at all. She knew she belonged to Ronald, her heart spoke unhesitatingly in his defense, but she lacked courage to meet his claims; they promised so much trouble, so much stress and uneasiness, perhaps a catastrophe worse than the marriage which had seemed so certainly to destroy all hope. Because she cherished this hope given back to life again, she wanted to treat it tenderly, to nourish it in the quietness of her mind, to allow it months of rest and growth, not to expose it suddenly to the storms of decision, saying it must be settled now or never. She dreaded casting everything upon the chances of a day to know whether she must live or die. She had no heart to face Ronald now. And yet he had come, and her aged friend was dying.

The past weeks had been happier beyond measure. Nancy had had nothing further to conceal from the old t'ai-t'ai. They understood one another perfectly. The t'ai-t'ai, having decided that Herrick's scrolls were the will of heaven, never turned back from this belief.

"These things are ordained," she had declared; "we can't fight against them."

She had walked with Nancy in the dried remnants of a garden which was the only breathing space the Chou family could boast. The paths were weedy and overgrown, the pond shrunk to a few pailfuls of stale water, withered vines hung from a summer house which was too chilly for them to enter. But Nancy had memories of winter sunshine, warm when the wind did not blow, and of blue unclouded skies, and she never forgot the picture of this imperious old woman who never deigned to lean upon her gnarled red cane, but walked erect, letting the sun glow proudly upon her white hair and bring mellow lustre from her jacket, which was dyed the stain of crushed cherries. The t'ai-ta'i had been a gay, unbent figure on days like those; the shape of an irascible tyrant, which her family dreaded so cravenly, she seemed to have left within doors to stand guard against her return. Meantime she took her holiday to pour out for Nancy's ears all the wealth of experience she had stored in the long changing years of her life. In recounting days at court, days when her husband wore the Emperor's button in his hat, and the peacock's feather, when he presented himself for an audience at the mysterious morning hour of three, his coat dazzling with twisted dragons, with a border rainbow-colored to show sunlight foaming across waves of the sea, her eyes grew luminous as they often did when she looked on Nancy; she became almost tolerant of her successors and their failure.

"Heaven made them fools," she exclaimed, half pityingly. "They could only do what they had it in them to do."

Nancy had never interrupted those stories. Her taste was not spoiled, like the taste of too many Western children, by a surfeit of books and papers. She was hearing romance from the lips of one who had lived. Half shutting her eyes she let the sun draw bright patterns from her lashes and fancied herself strolling through the painted corridors of the lake palaces. Her childish fancy returned. She should have been born earlier. She should have been one of the maidens chosen for the Emperor. Then perhaps she could have won his love. Her heart relaxed into meditating upon imaginary pictures which never could have been true, but which were pleasant to think about, wound about her as they were by the golden haze of the old t'ai-t'ai's memories. But they made her slightly disdainful of the West, till even the home of the Ferrises seemed common-place compared with her dreams of a barge punted lazily through the flowering heads of the lotus or the indolence of sipping tea in a red pavilion beside a still pool.

"No, those times are gone," said the t'ai-t'ai with a sigh, "they won't return in our day. And you, my child, will never be one of the ladies of the Emperor." She smiled quietly at Nancy's conceit. "But you can still hold these things in your heart; you can paint them and make them into verses for your children. For you will have many children and you will teach them to love China."

Nancy flushed at the t'ai-t'ai's prediction and wondered whose these unborn children should be.

As for the old woman, she allowed no doubt of her meaning. She now kept no secrets from the girl and was almost savage in her frankness, unleashing her scorn for the degenerate crowd which cluttered the family gates.

"You will not stay here," she repeated, times without count, "you must not stay here. If you were one of their blood,"—the t'ai-t'ai, in the pronouns she used, spoke as if even she and her family were different races,—"if you were one of their blood, it would be harder; they wouldn't wish to let you go, and your old family wouldn't want you back; there would be lawsuits till the end of time. But this is so simple. You are foreign born; when once you have gone, they will not weep for you. They might stop you if they saw you going, but only for face; after you have gone they will say, 'Oh, she was nothing but a foreigner. What use was there keeping her here?'"

So imperative did she become that Nancy asked once in astonishment: "Do you wish me to leave you?"

"Ah no," laughed the old lady, "you know that was not my meaning. You are more nearly kin to me than the children of my own flesh. I could not bear to part with you now and spend the rest of my days among fools. But neither can I bear the thought that you should spend the rest of your days—so many more than mine—as a slave to fools. So we must plan, you and I, how you are to go when I die. Ha, it's lucky I am old and can see things clearly. Twenty years ago I should have loved you just as much, my child, but I should never have had boldness enough to counsel the wife of my grandson to escape. Now, when I come to die, I command you to go, or I shall not die peacefully."

"But you are not going to die for years and years," laughed Nancy.

"This is my seventy-third winter," said the old lady, startling her with one of those sudden burning looks which made her eyes blaze, "my seventy-third winter, and my last."

Weakly Nancy protested, but by this time she knew too well that the t'ai-t'ai did not predict idly; her words, like her own father's scroll, seemed to get themselves fulfilled. The thought had looked absurd when she saw how straight the old woman carried herself, but it lurked in the back passages of her brain and came forward many a time during the ensuing weeks when the t'ai-t'ai abruptly would shatter her desire to dwell secure in comfortable, comforting talks by saying, "I—I shall soon die." Nancy came to believe, in spite of herself, and to watch, with the fascination of one who has been bewitched, the first marks of death upon the face of her aged friend.

"I am afraid of only one thing," said the t'ai-t'ai, "I am afraid of you. I am afraid that you will be too proud to escape when my time comes. So you must remember that it will be my express command then that you go. I am your father and mother now; you owe your obedience to me. I am the head of the family into which you have married; I take upon myself your duties to this family; when I go to my ancestors, I shall report to them what I have done and they will approve; we were not wont to be a small-livered people and we did not resist the will of heaven. Ah, my daughter, you have always obeyed, you have understood my wishes before I asked them. We cannot tamper with the mandate of heaven; your fate is your fate and you must accept it. You must go back, I say, to the husband your father first chose for you. You must bring him many sons to honor him and to honor you. Here you will be childless and forsaken. What comfort shall I have among the dead when I remember this? I will not eat of your sacrifices till you promise me this one thing. I will go like a starved spirit, I tell you, and be homeless and cold till you promise me. Will you promise me? Will you promise me? I demand it of you now because I know that I shall die."

Nancy had never seen the t'ai-t'ai so shaken by feeling. She felt she had trespassed upon a queen in one of those moments of human passion which a mere subject must pay with his life to witness.

"Yes," she whispered, falling down because she dared not look her mistress in the face, "I will promise you; I will go, but I cannot go till you are dead."

"That may be too late, my child."

"But I cannot go till you are dead—and oh, I don't want you to die."

"That may be too late."

"I cannot promise more than that," vowed Nancy, with a firmness that would not be denied.

The t'ai-t'ai stooped and lifted her up.

"No, of course you can't," she agreed, laughing gayly. "I know you can't. You can't help being yourself. But at least I have your promise that you will go after I am dead; you will not think yourself bound to linger here, wife and no wife, making yourself miserable and others spiteful. That is not any duty you owe to your father, or to me, or to Ming-te—he has a wife who is only waiting to take your title."

She paused for a moment and then burst out again in tones of indignation:—

"Ah, why can't other people see things clearly? I know my daughter and my daughter-in-law; I know every thought in their heads. They don't want you here and yet they won't want to let you go. They have a hundred imaginary scores to pay, scores against you, scores against me. They are angry even now because I protect you. They would pull down the family rather than forgo one item of the spite they ache to visit upon you. And why?—for no cause at all except their own greed. They gloat over the thought of humbling you and shaming you. They would have done it anyway because you will be helpless and in their power and because everything that goes wrong in their lives will be your fault. But they will be harsher now because I have taken you for my friend. They will remember every bit of honest advice I gave them and then they'll say, 'The old t'ai-t'ai said this and the old t'ai-t'ai said that, but the old t'ai-t'ai is dead; what shall we do? Ah, let's go and beat the foreign hsi-fu.'"

Nancy could not help laughing at the droll accuracy of this picture. It was such as Kuei-lien might have portrayed.

"Yes, you laugh," sniffed the old woman, having joined in the laugh herself, "but it is only because you see how lifelike are my words. You can fancy your p'o-p'o, after a good cry on my grave, after calling out, 'Venerable and sacred old mother, you have left your undutiful, ignorant daughter-in-law blinded with tears, unable to eat or to sleep from her grief for you; come back and let me grovel at your feet and make amends for my ten thousand unfilial sins.' You can see her coming home, saying, 'Heaven be praised, the old hag is dead.' Eh, she will make you eat with the pigs and sleep with the dogs. No, my child, if you will stay till I am dead you must be wary, you must be clever; there are foreigners in this place; go to them and go quickly, and remember what your father wrote for you. These women, pooh! they don't want you, yet they will try to keep you here so that they can spit on you till their lips shrivel round their yellow teeth."

Nancy did not enjoy these petulant storms and was glad when her mistress returned to sunnier moods.

The t'ai-t'ai did not take up the subject again. The next were days of unequaled calm. The weather was mild, as sometimes it will be in the deep of winter. A drowsy peace settled on the whole household after the excitement of the autumn. Nancy moved at ease through the house, often meeting the pretty, gentle girl who was so much more Ming-te's wife than she, and every time they met it was with a friendly greeting, every time with a pleasing deference on the part of the latest newcomer to the foreigner who in name was her mistress. Nancy's stepmother, her mother-in-law, both withheld their scoldings as if they were grateful to her for keeping the old t'ai-t'ai out of mischief; it seemed hard to believe they were storing venom against her. Ming-te Nancy never saw. He was busy with his studies. The father was away. The relatives, who had been a burden to the family chest, had taken their squabbling children home.

Nancy had unbroken leisure to read to the t'ai-t'ai, to listen to her, to match poems with her keen old mind. And many still afternoons they walked in the garden, enjoying sunshine so tranquil that Nancy lost all but the faintest shadow of dread that her friend might die. Death could not intrude upon this unclouded weather. She laughed at death and was willing to go on like this till she too was old, hearing the golden echo of famous times from the lips of a masterful, good-humored old woman.

Then came the wind and the dust hiding the sun, drifting through the frail protection of paper windows, laying floors and tables and chairs thick with sifted sand from the desert. Then came cold and snow and again the fierce voice of the north wind, its icy breath which no defense could keep out, numbing the faces and hands of those who tried to stand against it. People shivered and huddled on the k'ang to get what comfort they could from its warmth. The change fell so swiftly that Nancy could not shake herself all at once out of the calm which had been lulling her fears. And when she awoke it was only to outward amazement at the violence of a tempest such as she had never seen in Peking, such as she could not see except in these bleak villages of the Chihli plains, where the gales of half Asia rushed down unthwarted, trying to tear roofs from their walls, doors from their fastenings, courage from human hearts.

For a day the t'ai-t'ai must have complained of a chill before Nancy paid particular heed. She had been attentive, of course, from the first because, as the old woman had said, the girl outguessed every wish. But after a day when the chill had not begun to mend, but was growing worse, Nancy felt a doubt slip like ice through her veins. She remembered the t'ai-t'ai's prediction. In an instant she realized that death might already have stolen his march: that it was a treacherous little chill like this, so rapidly growing worse, which might end the old woman's seventy-three indomitable years. Fever, pain, coughing. Nancy was frightened by the remorseless haste they made, the way they tore down the strength of her mistress.

Backed by the wish of the sick woman, she forced the family to send for the foreign doctor, an act they were most reluctant to do, dismayed that the t'ai-t'ai at her age should turn from the tried ways of the Chinese physician. If she died the blame would not be theirs.

The foreign doctor had come. Nancy read in his face how little hope there was. And he had brought the news of Ronald's appearance in Paoling.

Her thoughts upside down, her mind confused, her heart afraid, Nancy sat through the long desolate hours of the night groping for the power to understand these fresh blows fate had dealt her. She had a promise to think of, and she wondered how she could keep it.

CHAPTER XXXV

In the morning the doctor came again. He found no change in his patient, who still lay open-eyed on her bed, evidently thinking, though she did not talk. It hurt her too much to talk. She seemed content when the doctor assured her Ronald was still in Paoling and in no immediate hurry to go.

"You can bring him with you the next time you come," she said.

The doctor looked rather anxiously toward Nancy.

"You must take some rest yourself, my child," he said. "I can't have two sick people on my hands."

The old t'ai-t'ai seemed to understand what he was saying.

"Yes, tell her to sleep," she insisted; "she must sleep. I shall be all right. My daughter can look after me."

Reluctantly Nancy gave up her post to her stepmother. She was sure she could not sleep. There were too many problems on her mind. Yet such was her need of rest that her eyes closed from sheer heaviness and nothing more did she know till she awoke late in the afternoon, surprised to find the storm abated and clear, cold sunshine gleaming through the paper windows of her room. Hurriedly she dressed and opened the door. The t'ai-t'ai turned her eyes when the girl entered and greeted her with a faint smile.

"Death is a slow business," she said, with the coolest of voices. She seemed to talk with more ease. Nancy did not guess how she had taken advantage of her own absence to defy the doctor's orders and speak out her mind to her daughter.

"What are you going to do with this girl when I die?" she had begun.

"Do?" echoed Nancy's stepmother, "what should I do? I am not her husband. I am not her mother-in-law, am I? What should I do?"

"I asked you what you are going to do with her," repeated the old woman, with an acid inflection to the question.

"What do you want done with her?" countered the daughter, anxious to see where her mother's words were leading.

"I want you to let her go. She does not belong here. Ming-te has a wife; he is contented. I want you to send her back to her own people."

"But that would cause scandal."

"Scandal, nonsense! No more scandal than was caused by your bringing her here in the first place or by your keeping her here. No one thinks scandal of what a foreigner does. People simply say they are crazy—that is the end of it. She will be forgotten in a week. That would be much more comfortable for all of you than to have to keep explaining her presence."

"You will tire yourself if you talk too much," remonstrated the younger woman. "It is not good for your sickness."

"What do I care what is good for my sickness?" exclaimed the t'ai-t'ai. "I am going to die anyway. I shall have plenty of time to be silent then."

"You mustn't say such things," spoke out the other, pretending to be shocked. "You are not going to die. This cold that you are suffering from, that will soon pass. You have lived too long to be snuffed out by the first winter gale."

"Don't you think this is a time to be honest?" asked her mother.

The other woman avoided an answer.

"Are you going to let her go, as I asked you?" went on the old t'ai-t'ai.

"Oh, there will be plenty of time to talk of that presently. This is no occasion to discuss such important plans. It's not for me to decide, anyway, what we ought to do with Nancy. That is for the others to determine."

"What you decide, they too will decide."

"You must have your broth now," said the daughter, trying to make light of the obstinate way her mother clung to her demands. "Why vex yourself about these things now? To-morrow will be time enough for a decision. There are so many things to be considered. It's no use being too hasty."

"There is one thing to be considered, her happiness and yours. For don't deceive yourself by thinking you will be happy if you keep the girl. We can't flaunt our spite in the face of heaven. And I tell you this marriage is against heaven itself; I have seen and I know. And everyone who has anything to do with it is cursed. What happened to her father? He died, the day of her marriage. And before another year is out, if you keep her here, you will be dead too. Are you going to release her or are you going to force me back from the dead to set her free? You have found me a stubborn old woman in life and you will find me more stubborn in death."

Not only had the voice of the sick woman gained its full power, but the old magical ascendancy of her will had asserted its strength. Her threat stirred the superstitious heart of her daughter. The boldness which had been gaining ground at the expense of her mother's weakness retreated again before a fear she did not know how to dispel, a vague intangible fear, here one minute, there the next, always eluding her when she tried to grapple with it, when she tried to laugh it down, the fear that a curse did in truth lie heavy upon Nancy's marriage to Ming-te. She remembered with terror how they had labored to straighten out Herrick's stiffened limbs.

"When do you want us to send her away?" she asked, after a sullen pause.

"When she asks to go," answered the t'ai-t'ai.

The daughter ransacked her mind for some pretext to avoid a promise, but she knew her mother too well of old, knew that she was not easily hoodwinked when she wanted a direct answer.

"Ah well, it can't be helped," she said finally. "If you really order me to do this, what can I do but obey? I will not keep her here. I will send her off."

The old woman gave a sigh of relief and said no more. The task of overriding her daughter, short and sharp though it had been, had cost too much of her strength. She had summoned every atom of her indomitable will to cower her adversary into making this unwilling promise. She had spoken as though the fortunes of life and death, of heaven and hell, were in her hands, and so extensive had been her mastery of this grumbling family that even the self-willed daughter flinched from the shadow of her curse. But her strength was failing; she knew how much had been spent in this passionate plea for Nancy; in her hour of weakness they might lose their dread of her temper, grow bold like village mongrels round a dying wolf. She lay quiet, husbanding what force remained, determined to keep her lifelong spell hard upon them to the end.

Her daughter felt it was safe to leave the patient for an hour. She got into long discussion with Nancy's mother-in-law over the promise which had been wrung out of her by the t'ai-t'ai. They talked the matter to and fro, back and forth, nosing out ways to evade the spirit while they kept the letter of this pledge. Away from the sick room, in the still cold sunshine which had followed the storm, the death of the old lady who had ruled them so long did not really seem so near at hand as to alarm them. Nor did it seem so in the sick room itself when Nancy appeared and found the t'ai-t'ai apparently resting.

Nancy felt stronger after her sleep and could not understand that her mistress had not been refreshed at the same time. When the sick woman said, "Death is a slow business," the girl was inclined to treat the remark lightly. The house seemed comfortingly peaceful after the wind which had been raging round the courtyards and tearing tiles loose from the eaves.

But the doctor, when he came, was not so well satisfied. He looked at the thermometer, and he shook his head.

"You have been exerting yourself," he said; "there is more fever here than there should be."

"Of course there is fever," scoffed the patient; "how can one be sick and not have fever?"

As for exerting herself, she laughed at the notion. What exertion could an old woman make when she was kept tied to her bed?

"Did you think I would jump up and play shuttlecock like a schoolboy?"

She dismissed the subject of her infirmities. "Have you brought him?" she asked.

The doctor knew whom she meant. "Yes, I brought him," he said, "but I am not sure it would be good for you to see him."

"It would not be good for me not to see him."

"Very well, have your own way," consented the doctor, humoring her stubbornness, "but don't go wasting your strength with too many words."

He went to the door and called Ronald, who had been waiting in a room outside. Nancy, standing at the opposite side of the bed, looked at the newcomer. She had not expected him. Her face flushed with embarrassment. She dared not lift her eyes again, but tried quietly to withdraw from the room.

"No, you must stay," said the t'ai-t'ai, who had observed her confusion with a swift glance. "I may need you to explain what I wish to say."

Then she turned her attention to Ronald, giving him a long exacting stare. It was evident she did not quite know how to appraise him. She was not used to foreigners, for Nancy, although she spoke of her theoretically as a Westerner, in the intimacy of her affection she always regarded as Chinese. So she faltered for a moment at her first sight of Ronald, vaguely disappointed, till she saw that he was transparently honest and kind and that he loved Nancy; then she took refuge in Timothy Herrick's judgment,—who, after all, was better able than he to judge a man of his own race?—and thought, with an inward chuckle, that if the gods themselves had come to claim Nancy she would not have deemed the wisest and the handsomest of them good enough.

She looked again at Nancy's blushing face.

"Ha, my child tenderly displays the reflection of the sun," she quoted, in a voice too low for any but Nancy to hear, and laughed contentedly to see the girl blush even more. "Never mind, never mind, tut, tut, tut, tut, it is good to be young. I won't ask you to translate for me."

This office she imposed upon the doctor.

"Tell him," she said, "that Nancy is free to go. I am the head of this family and I have given my permission, and I have the promise of her stepmother for the rest of them, and I have her own promise that she will go. This marriage was a mistake. We disobeyed heaven when we made it. I have learned some things I did not know before—he ought to understand what I mean—and I cannot die with peace in my heart until I have set this mistake right. Is that clear?"

It was entirely clear.

"She can go this very minute; that would be the best plan," said the old t'ai-t'ai playfully. "Will you go now, Nancy?"

Nancy shook her head back and forth quickly like a punished child refusing to be good.

"There, you see," exclaimed the woman, half jesting, half sorry, "you see how stubborn and self-willed she is. Now that I have become old and helpless even she won't obey me."

A deep silence followed, during which everyone seemed wondering what to say.

"No, it's no use," went on the t'ai-t'ai at last, "I've tried my hardest to persuade her to go. But she refuses. She must wait till I am dead. He will stay in Paoling?" she asked anxiously.

"Yes," the doctor answered for Ronald.

"Good. He will not need to wait long."

Even the doctor, cheerful as he had been, was not brave enough to contradict her with a lie. He had directed Nancy in all that she could do—all that anyone could do, now, he thought to himself. Promising to return early in the morning, he took Ronald away with him.

Ronald could not speak. His brain carried a picture of the marvelous old woman lying shrunken and helpless on the couch, her face burning with fever, her eyes, wistful and bright, searching him for every sign that he was fit to marry Nancy. The girl he loved so utterly seemed almost a shadow in comparison; he had only ghostlike glimpses of her averted face. With a deep groan he wondered if he were ever going to win her.

As soon as the doctor had left, Nancy's stepmother and her mother-in-law came to inquire what he had said, but the t'ai-t'ai did not encourage them to stay. She was doing as well as one could hope, she told them; she was tired and did not want to talk. She knew that her daughter would be filled with curiosity about Ronald's visit, but she would explain nothing, only asking to be left alone, with Nancy watching her.

Ronald's appearance had indeed excited the stepmother, who remembered him angrily as Herrick's executor. She hated him because of the trust that had been shown him by her husband, the powers that had been given him in her rightful place.

"So that's the game!" she exclaimed. "That's what the shameless girl has been working for, is it? That's why she has turned my poor old mother's head and made her play the fool in her dotage!"

She choked in her wrath.

"Fancy her cunning in getting that meddlesome barbarian here. Who ever heard the like to her treachery? And he, not satisfied with stealing our money, now dares to steal our wives out of our houses."

She raved in her hatred of Nancy. Every grudge she could rake up from the past, every quarrel Nancy had had with Li-an, every childish offense went into a score which, if she had dared, she would have torn the girl limb from limb to erase. "That miserable promise!" she kept repeating, vexing herself half mad to find ways of breaking it.

The victim of her hatred stood profoundly quiet beside the bed of the dying woman. The latter had heaved a great sigh when she found herself at last with only Nancy watching her.

"I have done all I can," she said. "Your life is in your own hands now, my jewel. If I were only strong enough to take you away from here with my own arms—I am so afraid for you, I am still so afraid for you. But I can do no more. I am no good. I am too old."

These were the first despondent words Nancy had ever heard her proud old mistress use. She dared not weep, but sat down and put her hand on the sick woman's forehead, trying to cool the heat of the fever, to repay something of the debt of gentle caresses she owed.

"Sing to me," said the t'ai-t'ai at last.

Of all the songs she knew, Nancy could think of none but the song Kuei-lien had sung to her the night before her wedding. It had gone ringing through her head for days afterward and now, when she knew but would not confess her mistress was dying, nothing else could so contain her fear and her love.

Nancy's voice was not Kuei-lien's. It was more closely a child's voice, artless, straightforward, and simple, but she sang very clearly, very tenderly, till even the candles seemed to stop flickering and the old woman shut her eyes, letting her mind drift into contented reverie from the peace she got in knowing that Nancy was near.

"Swift the summer sun in his day,
Swift the autumn moon in her night,
Slow the winter frost with its blight,
Trampling golden leaves from its way.

"Gold youth, scarlet love, each must fade,
Moon and stars cease shining in the night,
Winter snows shall long glimmer white,
Scarlet leaves and gold low are laid."

Nancy stopped. She wanted to hide her face again, but there was no place to hide. She had to bear up for the sake of her friend. But the song unloosed such overwhelming memories that she had to sit speechless, tensely careful not to move lest she let free the tears which were poised imminently behind the straining floodgates of her eyes.

The t'ai-t'ai reached for her hand.

"I have lived seventy-three years," she said, "and in all those seventy-three years this is the most peaceful moment I have known. I don't want you to offer me anything else, child—incense, food, money, I don't want them, nothing else but one thing, your happiness. If you want me to rest, you must bring me that."

She sank back in the bed as if to sleep more comfortably. Her eyes closed. Her mind seemed to slip away. The heat of the fever mounted. Nancy busied herself with the expedients the doctor had suggested, but they brought no relief. Again and again she begged the sick woman to give some sign that she heard, but she got no response. At last in despair she woke up her stepmother. The woman came rushing in, half dressed, took one look.

"Ai, she is dying," she cried, and rushed out to call the family.

They had all come in readiness for the worst. It was only the work of a few minutes before they were crowding round the bedside, weeping in terror as they watched the old t'ai-t'ai's struggles for breath. Their wailing filled the room, deafening the last pangs of the dying woman.

Suddenly she sat bolt upright and looked round with the caustic look they knew so well.

"Humbugs!" she snorted in a cold scornful voice which struck with double sharpness on their ears because of the sudden hush in the chamber. "Humbugs!"

Then she dropped back with a gasp on her pillow. The old t'ai-t'ai had spoken her mind to the last.

There was a shameful pause, as though the family waited one of her familiar scoldings and could not believe she was dead. Her eldest son was the first to rouse himself. During the unspeakable silence which still prevailed he got up slowly and lighted incense and white candles beside the bed while everyone watched him, spellbound. Not till the first spluttering glow of the candles could they move.

When at last they realized that the spirit of the old t'ai-t'ai was being lighted on her way, they went mad. Everyone began shouting and crying and tearing his hair; the women beat their breasts and forced tears from their eyes. The room was not large enough to hold the echo of their weeping. Yet in the midst of this paroxysm Nancy could hear her name called. She looked round. Her stepmother was beckoning to her. The others were so taken up by their own grief that they paid no heed when Nancy stumbled over them to emerge from the frenzied circle of mourners.

"I have some work for you to do," whispered her stepmother, giving her orders about things she was to fetch.

Nancy stole out of the room unobserved and went blindly through the dark house, hearing the din of the weeping family jangling across every cold courtyard. She was too numb with sorrow to think about herself or her own fate. She wanted to weep out her heart beside the body of her mistress. Nothing else at this moment could satisfy her. She found a candle and groped into the room to which her stepmother had sent her. Suddenly she heard a noise and turned. Only a pace behind her stood the woman herself. Nancy saw, with a frightened glance, that she had no good intent in her mind; she saw her glaring, like a panther ready to spring.

"I promised you should go," said the woman harshly, "and you're going—now! You are not going back there, do you hear me? You are not one of us, you don't belong to this family, and you shall not weep with us just because you managed to addle the brains of my old mother. You killed her. You are not fit for us to wipe our feet on. Out you go, I say! Go and play the whore with your foreign friend! You are a stench in our nostrils. You slut, you filthy tortoise, you dirty bawd, what right have you to think you can go in there and corrupt the dead with your false tears?"

Nancy was staggered by this abuse. It meant only one thing in her mind, that she was being robbed of her place beside the body of her protector. Her heart could not grasp the idea of being torn away with this cruel, this unbelievable abruptness. She cared nothing for herself, nothing for her own future; she would have bartered the freedom of a lifetime just to be allowed to cling to that lifeless body; she was lost to all reason; she sobbed for the privilege of being close to her dead mistress as though more than her life hung upon it. She could not believe that her stepmother was in earnest; she could not believe that she, who had shared the golden beauty of these last days in the company of her beloved old t'ai-t'ai, should be driven away like an outcast, like a creature lower than the dogs which slunk through the open doors. She opened her mouth in protest, ready to offer herself as a slave, but the woman fetched her a stinging blow across the lips.

"Your words have done enough mischief in this house," she jeered. "I won't hear more of them."

Nancy drew back. The candle shook in her hand, throwing ominous, weird shadows across her face. She was an animal which has been wounded and does not know the meaning of the violence dealt to it. Then from far away, like a rising gust of wind, came the dismal lamentation of the mourners. With a start Nancy dropped the candle. An overpowering impulse seized her to rush back, back to her mistress, to throw herself on the floor, to throw herself on the ground by the bed, and to weep. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else must stand in her way. She was mad. She was indeed an animal, an animal trapped, beating out its life in its panic to get the one thing it desired.

She tried to rush past her stepmother, but there was light enough from the dim lantern by the door to keep the woman from being taken unawares.

"No, you don't go back," she shrieked, "not a step do you go back. Out you go, I say, out! out! out!"

She seized the girl with her hands, clawing her face, tearing her hair. She was as mad as Nancy and stronger, and she had her sister-in-law to help her. The latter had grabbed Nancy's arms and was pulling them back till the pain shot like tongues of flame through her tortured body. Inch by inch they strained toward the door, fighting with teeth and nails and feet, their breath, too spent for words, coming and going in convulsive gasps.

Nancy writhed and twisted to get out of the grasp of her tormentors, insensible to more pain, the need to get back to the side of her dead friend possessing her like a legion of devils. But the women were more than she could stand against. Slowly they dragged her across the floor; she contested every inch, but they beat down her strength, they pommeled her and bruised her and tore her clothes into long rags, they struck her across the head till she was almost senseless. Desperately she struggled, but uselessly, for the stepmother grasped her throat with sinewy hands and, pressing tighter and tighter, stifled her till her eyes were ready to leap from their sockets and her lungs choked vainly for air. Then they opened the great gate, swinging it wide on its creaking axles, and flung the girl, like a heap of discarded rubbish, into the street.

She was not dead. The cold air forced itself at the price of agony down her throat. The blood began moving again. But her mind had still one single insane thought, to get back to the deathbed, so as soon as she was able to pull herself up she plunged against the barred door, throwing herself again and again upon its unyielding boards, crying, as she thought, with a voice which could be heard for miles, but which actually was only the hoarse rattle of a whisper. She did not think of Ronald or of anything else. She forgot the iron cold clamping its grip on her veins, chains of steely frost from which no prisoner, once bound, could escape. She wanted to get back to her mistress, back to her mistress or to die. And what the women had begun she was in a fair way to complete when a sudden spell of weariness halted her, a spell of deep warm peace. She felt the hand of the old t'ai-t'ai on her shoulder.

"Do you care?" she heard her voice saying. "Ah, my child, my child, why do you care?"

It was all right now. She could sleep and be comforted.

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Table of Contents

- SUN AND MOON
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- CHAPTER IX
- CHAPTER X
- CHAPTER XI
- CHAPTER XII
- CHAPTER XIII
- CHAPTER XIV
- CHAPTER XV
- CHAPTER XVI
- CHAPTER XVII
- CHAPTER XVIII
- CHAPTER XIX
- CHAPTER XX
- CHAPTER XXI
- CHAPTER XXII
- CHAPTER XXIII
- CHAPTER XXIV
- CHAPTER XXV
- CHAPTER XXVI
- CHAPTER XXVII
- CHAPTER XXVIII
- CHAPTER XXIX
- CHAPTER XXX
- CHAPTER XXXI
- CHAPTER XXXII
- CHAPTER XXXIII
- CHAPTER XXXIV
- CHAPTER XXXV
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE