"I read," she said, "and play with Om and Su. I have taught them some American games. Do you know parchesi and the Mansion of Happiness?"
"Yes, I've played them," he admitted cautiously. "But do you never see any white people except your uncle and aunt?"
"Why, no," she said. "Two summers ago, after the cholera, we visited Dr. Ferguson at Chang-Wing—that is over there. He is a medical missionary, but I did not like him because he asked me to marry him. He was sixty years old. Do you think it was right?"
"Right!" cried the boy. "It was a wicked sin."
"Well, he is the only white man I have met except you," said the girl. "Of course, I can remember a little playing with boys and girls a long, long time ago. Where is your ship?"
"That little white one down there. Can you see?" said the boy, pointing.
"Oh, is that it?" she asked. "Where are its sails?"
"There aren't any," he answered; "it goes by steam."
"I have read the 'Voyage of the Sunbeam,'" she said, "it is a beautiful book. It came out last year in a box. I have nearly twenty books in all."
The boy bit his lips. He was getting angry—angry that an American girl should have been imprisoned in such a hole all her young life—such a girl, too! What right had an elderly man and woman, even though they enjoyed the privilege of consanguinity, to exile a beautiful child from her native country and bring her up for the glory of God in a stewing, stinking, cholera-infested, famine-ridden Chinese village?