“I have not forgotten where I first saw you,” Sên said, with no hint or sound of hidden meaning.
“Your hands—they are different—you know”—Ivy hesitated a little.
“Chinese,” Sên said.
“Yes,” the girl nodded, “and not very thick, and I wondered—that night at Miss Julia’s—how much use they’d be at fisticuffs. I know now, Mr. Sên.”
She let the chamois loop on her riding-crop just fleck the hand on his horse’s bridle as she spoke, her eyes freemason friendly on him.
Sên lay his hand on her pommel for a moment. “Chinese hands,” he told her, “that always will serve to take care of you when you allow me to be your escort.”
“I know that,” the girl said quietly.
CHAPTER XXIV
The story of Reginald Hamilton’s last ride in Washington never got out. His horse found its way back to its stable, quite uninjured, and that, plus a check for a bill never before too promptly paid, satisfied the liveryman who owned it. Unlike Washington society, he was not curious. And neither Ivy nor Sên King-lo told any one—for some weeks not even Sir Charles. Had Hamilton stayed on in Washington, probably both his cousin and their friend would have felt that Snow must be told—that he, the only man in America who had a right to do it, might stand between the girl and any further advances of the Reginald. But a week after his descent to the snow-thick road, Reginald and his sister, together, though not on speaking terms, betook them to Chicago.
Reginald Hamilton had been away from Washington for a few days when Emmeline had achieved her newspaper coup; and on his return, after the ill-fated paragraph’s contradiction, she had managed to prevent him from attempting a tardy intervention. But he had heard all about it, of course; and, though not quite dull enough to doubt that the invention had been Emmeline’s, with intention and hope behind it, it had humiliated as well as enraged him; and this, added to his thwarted and growing passion for Ivy, had swung him quite off his balance of mind and breeding, never very secure. And his outrageous and, because futile, absurd behavior had been, at least in part, a demented blow struck in his sister’s defense. He, craven though he was, would have slain Emmeline himself before he’d have seen her married to a Chinese; but he was infuriated that Chinese Sên King-lo had scorned the hint which, as Hamilton (and all Washington) knew, Emmeline more than once had given.