Margaret was delighted at the appearance of the cottage, a tiny bungalow, deep-verandahed, standing amid a grove of China pines that rustled perpetually with a cooling murmur. The highway leading to it was more like a conservatory than a street.
“You dear old papa!” she exclaimed, sitting down rapturously upon the steps, after having rushed through the building from front to rear, startling the dignified and spotless Chinese cook which they had inherited from the former tenants.
“How good you are to get all this for me! It must have cost such a lot, too. Mr. Elliott says that houses up here cost two hundred dollars a month. You didn’t pay all that, did you? Now we must be very economical, and we’ll all work. I’m going to discharge that Chinaman.”
“You can’t work. You’d scandalize the Peak,” said Elliott.
“I don’t care anything for the Peak. I’m going to fire that Chinee first of all. I’m afraid of him, he looks so mysteriously solemn, as if he knew all sorts of Oriental poisons, and I never can learn pidgin-English. No, I’m going to cook, and I’ll make you doughnuts and fried chicken and mashed potatoes and real American coffee and all the good old United States things that you haven’t tasted for so long.”
“But you can’t do anything like that. No white woman works in this country,” Elliott expostulated.
“But I shall,” she retorted, firmly.
And she did,—or, rather, she tried hard to do it. But it turned out to be difficult, and often impossible, to procure the ingredients for the preparation of the promised American dishes, and she was by increasing degrees forced back upon the fare of the country, which she did not quite know how to deal with. It did not matter,—not even when it came to living chiefly upon canned goods, which usually were American enough to satisfy the most ardent patriot. The three had come to regard the affair in the light of a prolonged picnic, and they agreed that it was too hot to eat doughnuts and fried chicken, anyway.
Laurie still went down the mountain to the sweltering lower city every morning and did not return till sunset. Elliott and Margaret usually spent the day together, for he had temporarily abandoned the search for the mate. An unconquerable horror of the town had filled him, and he silenced an uneasy conscience by telling himself that he would learn nothing new if he did go there.
Sometimes he helped Margaret to wash the breakfast things, and then he sat lazily in a long chair on the wide veranda, smoking an excellent Manila cheroot and reading the China Daily Mail. He could hear Margaret softly moving about inside the house; she dropped casual remarks to him through the open window, and usually she ended by coming out and sitting with him, reading or sewing with an industry that even the climate could not tame. Below them the steamy rain-clouds drifted and wavered over the city; Hongkong Roads ran like a zigzag strip of gray steel out to the ocean, but it was cool, if damp, upon the Peak, and the two had reached such a degree of intimacy that sometimes for an hour they did not say a word.