“But there, I have given you now a rough account of it all; details will follow later. Here is your breakfast coming in. I want to take a turn round and see how matters stood up to the time when we arrived, and after that I am going to see my cousins. I was going to say I suppose you will be all off duty now, but I hear that the firing has broken out again. That shows that although we have got in, the Chinese have not got out, and may give us more trouble before we have done with them. By the way, what has become of the Empress?”
“She bolted three days ago when she heard, I fancy, that you had taken Tung–Chow. I donʼt know whether it would be wise to send a force in pursuit of her, considering that the town is still full of Chinese troops and that there is so much to be done here. Besides, though she has a tremendous train of baggage with her, it would take some daysʼ march for infantry to catch her, and it would be a risky thing for our small force of cavalry to go alone, as of course she has taken a considerable body of troops with her.”
“Yes, I donʼt think they will pursue her,” Rex said. “There must be someone for us to treat with, and if we were to take her prisoner it is pretty certain that, directly we had gone, she would repudiate any treaty she might make, on the ground that it was obtained from her by force. The Chinese never hold to treaties, and this would afford them so excellent an excuse for breaking one that the agreement would hardly be worth the paper it was written on.”
“Well, I shall come back about ten oʼclock, and then, before I give you any details of what I have seen, I shall expect you to give me a full account of all that has taken place here since I went away.”
Rex now went to the hospital again. A nurse went to inform the girls of his arrival, and almost immediately they came flying out.
“We are glad to see you again, Rex,” Jenny said; “we have been in dreadful anxiety about you. When you went away we had no idea that it would be so dreadfully long before you came back.”
“I did not think it would be myself,” he said, “but it has certainly not been my fault that I did not get back sooner. I can assure you that I have been quite as anxious about you as you can have been about me.”
“We were so dreadfully disappointed yesterday when the troops came in, to find that you were not with them. We asked a good many officers, but only one knew anything about you, and he said that you were with the Japanese.”
“Yes, that was so. It would have been very difficult for me to get leave to come with my own people, but the Japanese were glad of an extra interpreter. Now, how have you been all the time?”