“Oh, yes!” he said, he “had noticed her, several times.” He did not add how well he knew her, or how highly he valued her, or that he had received her in this very room, and in the middle of the night, not long ago. But he promised cordially to do any earthly thing he ever could for the Chinese woman. It was a queer legacy for a bachelor priest, he said, laughing, but all was fish that came to his net—pastoral or otherwise—and he accepted Ah Wong heartily. She should come into his service, if she would—potter about the bungalow, sit hunched up on the verandah and sew, or play a guitar or a native drum or something in the compound—and, if she declined his service, still he’d try to contrive to look after her some other way. He’d keep an eye on her, a friendly, helpful eye—if she’d let him—seriously he would.
And he echoed fervently the amah’s entreaty that the Gregorys should leave China at once—at once—let the order of their going be what it would, the comforts or discomforts of the first outgoing boat just what they might. Nothing mattered, absolutely nothing, except for them to go—to go at once, and never to return.
“You’ll say good-by to them all for me?” he begged, “I—I may be called away for a few days by any post. But please say my good-bys to them all: your husband—and Basil—and to your daughter. And, Mrs. Gregory, young Carruthers is staying here, you said. I’ll look him up as soon as I know you’ve sailed, and I’ll look after him a bit, be a sort of parson his-man-Friday, if the boy’ll let me.”
“Tom?—Tom’s a nice boy—I think,” Mrs. Gregory said a trifle hesitantly.
“I think so too,” the priest said cordially.
She was going into the city when she left him, and he went almost to the level with her, walking beside her chair.
“Remember,” he said at parting, “you’ll go at once. And you’ll none of you come back—ever.”
“We will go at once,” she told him earnestly. “And we will not come back.” But to that last there was a small reservation at the far back of her mind. She thought it just possible that Hilda might come back—some day. Not that Hilda particularly liked China; she did not—she greatly preferred Kensington. But, if Holman thought well of Tom Carruthers, it was probable that he—now that Basil was definitely out of the Hong Kong running—might be permanently attached to that branch, and ultimately its head.
And with one slight deviation, Mrs. Gregory kept the promise she made John Bradley as he stood bare-headed beside her chair. For they did sail—almost at once. And only one of them ever came back—Hilda.
The long voyage home differed in nothing from all other such voyages. Not one voyage in ten thousand ever does differ from other voyages. It is impossible. They made the same stops, the same changes, ate the same food, had the same fellow passengers. Nothing short of pirates or a shoal of ship-devouring Jonah’s whales could differentiate one P. & O. passage from another.