“Now,” Wu said in a changed tone, speaking briskly and quick, as the door closed on Murray, “I will open the matter to Mrs. Gregory—if you please.”
“What’s your object in wanting to humiliate me before my wife?” Gregory asked drearily.
Wu smiled. “Merely a ‘Chinaman’s’ idea of—humor, let us say.” He slid the Webley lazily into his sleeve.
Florence Gregory came in eagerly. Knowing less than her husband did of the mandarin’s important place in international finance, yet she had a far clearer estimate of Wu Li Chang’s personal potency than Gregory had. Ah Wong had coached her—if only with a hint or two—and she had her own woman’s instinct, fine and alert.
Wu had risen instantly, and taken a courteous step towards her. He paused as she did. For a moment she stood looking from one man to the other questioningly, and then she fixed her anxious eyes on Wu, and they stood measuring each other quietly.
For once the English eyes were the quicker. Perhaps sex and motherhood combined outweighed any and every superiority of race. Perhaps he gave her a much more careless gaze than she gave him. Perhaps her exquisite anxiety gave her sharper sight. At all events, as they looked, she almost recognized him, but he had no such experience concerning her. For a puzzled instant her mind trembled towards “When? Where?” and in a few moments, or in less mental turbulence, her half-awakened memory might have caught up a broken thread, a forgotten acquaintance; but Wu spoke, and in the tension of her anxiety the chance passed.
“Mrs. Gregory,” Wu Li Chang began, deferentially bowing and going a little nearer, “I am sorry to be compelled to ask your presence, but, before I explain, will you take this weapon from me? You see”—-he laughed a little, lightly—“I present it to you with the barrel toward my own breast—but”—and this he added with quiet emphasis—“do not give it to your husband.” As he indicated Gregory he gave him a straight look. “I trust to your honor.” And he bowed again as he held the pistol out towards her.
She took it wonderingly, and held it so. She was not one of the women who have an exaggerated fear of weapons, but neither was she one of those who rather affect them. She had never hunted, and she had never practiced pistol shooting (Hilda had done both). Ordinarily Florence Gregory would have declined to hold a revolver. But she took this and held it steadily—puzzled but not afraid. She was in an abject terror for her boy that left no room for petty, personal, bodily qualms.
“What—what is all this?” she said ruefully. “Robert, what have you been doing?”
He sighed heavily before he answered her. “Mr. Wu has rather over-reached me in—a little transaction.”