And then she sat down on the floor again, her cold, ringless hands clasped at her knees, and waited and listened until her father’s gong should strike.
She knew that she should hear it presently.
Once she started, and caught up from the floor a little scented bead. She held it to her face, and then laid it away in her bosom. It was her father’s, one of a string he often wore, and in her bitter misery she was pathetically a little happier for the proof it gave her that his own hands had carried her here. She would keep it in her bosom always—while she lived.
Twice servants came in with trays of food and drink; blanc-mange, soup, tea and wine. They made deep obeisance to her when they came and when they went. But she did not speak to them, nor they to her.
And no message came until the message of the great gong’s soft boom.
CHAPTER XX
What Wu Did in Proof of Love
WU, when he had laid Nang Ping on her mats and covered her, went to his library, and sat thinking through the night.
When he had lifted her, he had not glanced at the Englishman, nor had he even looked in the direction of prison or prisoner since. The servants had their orders. Those orders would be obeyed. With Basil Gregory, Wu had nothing more to do—yet.
All night long he scarcely moved by so much as the drumming of finger or toe, by so much as the quiver of a lash. None of Nang Ping’s restlessness was shared by him. He was beyond restlessness. His agony was absolute. Mothers suffer acutely when daughters “fall”—good mothers and bad. But such mothers’ sorrow can never equal the red torment of fatherhood so punished. Nature holds stricter justice between sex and sex than she is credited. And such partiality and unfair favoritism as he does show now and then is given, as is the gross favoritism of man-made laws constantly (in Europe and in Asia), to women.