“Yes,” he said presently, “and if only for that reason, the children, don’t you see that it would better end here and now? At the worst—now—one. But if—if I did marry Nang and take her to England, there might be others.”

Bradley groaned. “It is all very difficult. The consequences of wrong always are. I don’t see my way. You must let me think a bit; perhaps to-morrow I’ll see what’s best, least bad!” He groaned again, but he did not tell Gregory that it had just occurred to him that legal marriage without Wu’s consent might prove impossible. Wu’s consent would never be had, he thought. They solve such problems differently in China. They cut them.

CHAPTER XIII
Mrs. Gregory

ON one point, and on just one, John and Basil had agreed last night: Mrs. Gregory was to be spared as much as possible. She and Hilda were to remain happily ignorant of what had happened—ignorant of it in its worst form, if that could be compassed.

Basil had carefully omitted telling the clergyman of the proposed visit of the morrow. He would have cancelled it if he could have thought of any way. But he had not a devisive brain. His mother had quite set her heart on the excursion. He felt safe that he could trust to Nang Ping’s pride. Her pride would carry her through, and save and screen him, as such outraged womanly pride has saved and screened such men ever since Eve gave an apple to a man in Eden.

In this episode of Nang Ping (a little nefarious episode of his life; the soul-crux, the supreme tragedy of the girl) Basil Gregory cut the sorriest figure, for he had but toyed with her, he had indulged passion, passion had not mastered him, she was his toy, he her god; he felt tenderness for her, but not love; he had not the great excuse of a great love. His lingering by the sun-drenched lotus pond and in the scented dark of the old pagoda had been mere dalliance, not obsession. And yet the young Englishman was not all bad—far from that. To no one do the wise lines of the Western genius apply more closely:

“In men, whom men proclaim divine,

I find so much of sin and blot;