"You are all right?"—anxiously.
"Yes … but dreadfully tired."
Mrs. Dolby smiled. It was the moment for smiles. She approached Ruth with open arms; and something in the way the child came into that kindly embrace hurt the older woman to the point of tears.
These passers-by who touch us but lightly and are gone, leaving the eternal imprint! So long as she lived, Ruth would always remember that embrace. It was warm, shielding, comforting, and what was more, full of understanding. It was in fact the first embrace of motherhood she had ever known. Even after this woman had gone, it seemed to Ruth that the room was kindlier than it had ever been.
Inexplicably there flashed into vision the Chinese wedding procession in the narrow, twisted streets of the city, that first day: the gorgeous palanquin, the tom-toms, the weird music, the ribald, jeering mob that trailed along behind. It was surely odd that her thought should pick up that picture and recast it so vividly.
At half after five that afternoon the doctor and his friend
McClintock entered the office of the Victoria.
"It's a great world," was the manager's greeting.
"So it is," the doctor agreed. "But what, may I ask, arouses the thought?"
The doctor was in high good humour. Within forty-eight hours the girl would be on her way east and the boy see-sawing the South China Sea, for ever moving at absolute angles.
"Then you haven't heard?"