Baby Blanche was fast asleep.
But Ivy was not.
She knelt by the bed, all the sweetness of girlhood unspoiled, all the motherhood-love in the face she bent over the child that slept in her cradling arms, baby head on maiden breast. And Kwan Yin-ko up on the wall, was guarding them both.
And Sên King-lo knew.
A great light came into his eyes. A sudden beat under his ribs made a vein on his forehead swell and throb, quivered his lips; and all his being rushed to the kneeling girl.
As quietly as he had come in, he turned and went, and went from the house, an up-to-date Washington flat that was a sanctuary now.
He knew his own secret now, knew it as completely and as surely as he had learned it suddenly.
Nature had torn a veil aside, and a man had looked in.
He had seen his own soul, and he knew that if ever life gave him a child—a girl-child, perhaps, to bear his mother’s name—he but now had seen its mother—an English girl kneeling beside his bed.