When Florence Gregory looked about her—when she was able to—the doors were open, and the wide window opened noiselessly from without. No one had entered the room. They were quite alone, she and what had been Wu Li Chang. And there was not a sound except the love-sick ecstasy of a nightingale singing his devoted desire through the jasmine-scented garden.
Very slowly, horror-stricken, watching him till the last, she crept from the room, leaving it, by chance, through the door at which she had entered it.
She had aged in that room.
CHAPTER XXXIX
Afterwards
AS she passed from the house into the garden, moving crazily on—not knowing why, how or where—the frenzied mother met her son coming blindly toward the door, his arms still trussed at his sides.
Neither could speak.
But a Chinese woman, coming to them stealthily through the gloaming, spoke as she reached them. “Clome, me tlake,” she said.
And almost literally she did take them, one on either side of her, each touched by her hand, impelled by her will.
“No talk,” she whispered sternly.