“You’d like to throttle me when I dare say, ‘How would you like it, what would you think of it then, if a Chinese man treated your sister as you have treated this Chinese girl?’ Well, I say it again—and I hold your sister very dear—I say it again. And I say more: I say, ‘Why not?’ You have set the example—you and some generations of Christian gentlemen! And I tell you the day of reckoning will come.” With a gesture of despair he picked up his discarded pipe and filled it with nice men’s opium—tobacco.

When he had lit his pipe, Bradley sat and pulled at it moodily, and for a while Basil, thrashed and sore, sat and watched him. But the prick of personal dilemma could not give way long to, or even be dwarfed by, any thought of a general tragedy, be it as great and terrible even as Bradley averred.

“You said you knew how this was going to end for me——”

“And for her! Yes. It began in selfishness. It will go on, forever, in misery. It will end in misery. But there is just one thing now. A crime can never be so damned black that it can’t be made blacker. Yours is black enough, and it is going to stop right there. You must marry her.”

“I say——”

“You needn’t. There is nothing for you to say; you have come to me for help, and I am going to help you, as far as I can.”

“But——”

“Oh! there’ll be trouble—plenty of trouble. Wu will never forgive you or the poor child; though it’s he himself he ought not to forgive for having let a Chinese girl out and unwatched so with us English about. He’ll punish you both, and what Wu does he does well. There’ll be no escaping him. No boat will take you beyond his reach, no spot on earth hide you. You can’t stay in China with her. Her position would be too intolerable, even for one of us to inflict on a woman. You must take her to England—if you can get there. And even if Wu lets you do the best you can with the monstrous mess you’ve made of life for yourself and for her, you’ll both be miserable there, but not quite so miserable as you’d be in China. England is the one country on earth where the Eurasian, the poor innocent mongrel result of such conduct as yours, is treated a little better than contagion and vermin. Think what chance your children would have here! You have seen such children here, and how they fare!”

Little as he, in common with most of his race, had troubled to observe in Asia, Basil Gregory knew well enough how those half-European, half-Chinese were despised and treated in Hong Kong, and how much more despised by the Chinese than by the Europeans. And he knew too—though not so thoroughly as Bradley did—that to the Chinese at least such Eurasians were doubly despised when born in wedlock. The Chinese mind has some contemptuous shrug of “n’importe” for such racial misdemeanor that is unaffectedly wanton, but to that mind marriage makes the gross miscarriage ten times more putrid. Such few attempts at European-Chinese marriage as are braved in China are between, almost always, European men and Chinese women. Exiled, the Chinese will marry and treat well and honorably the women of the race of the place in which he lives—he does it in Singapore, in Chicago and in Rio—but never for him such mixed marriage in China.

Basil had no intention of making the experiment in China or otherwise. Escape, not atonement, was his intention.