The glow-worms came out then and speckled the garden with tiny points of fire. Nang Ping called them by a prettier name: kwang yin têng, lamps of mercy, as her father had called them when, as a boy of ten, he crossed Sze-chuan to wed her baby mother in Pekin.
They kissed again, the man and the girl. Kissing is not a Chinese art. Basil Gregory had taught Wu Nang Ping to kiss.
“Oh! if only I could!” the girl said impulsively, and then broke off as suddenly as she had begun.
“Could what, Nang Ping?” He asked it a little uneasily—uneasy at a something in her voice.
“Tell them all about us,” she replied simply, but her voice aglow with ecstasy at the thought.
Gregory was aghast. “Tell them all about us!” he cried hoarsely.
“Oh! not all things,” she whispered, creeping a little closer in his arms. “There are some things one would not tell, even to the birds.”
Basil Gregory’s conscience, to its credit, shuddered sickly then, and his arm trembled, not in tenderness, but in shame.
But self-preservation is indeed the first law of much man-nature, and he said quickly, “I don’t mind what you tell to the birds, but you must be extremely careful not to let my mother or sister know. Extremely careful,” he repeated with dictatorial emphasis.
“Why?”