“To pay a debt,” he replied with a smile. “We Chinese must be free of debt on our New Year, and that would just about give me time. And you—I know what you think—you think you’d find my language dull, and that you never would have any use for it. But you may go to China one day, and then you’d find it very useful.”
“I go to China? No such luck! Jersey City perhaps, or even Margate, after we get home again. But I shall never see your country, Mr. Sên—or Calcutta, or Damascus, or Venice, or Madrid. I shall travel in narrow gray ways always. It is written.”
Sên shook his head. “We never can tell,” he reminded her.
“I can,” she said briefly.
He laughed at her again. Then—“Well, but, let me get out of debt then.”
“What is the debt?”
“May I tell you? I wonder. You, I fear, Miss Gilbert, will not like it. It will not seem to you a compliment. But it is one—from me. I’d like to tell you. Shall I?”
The girl nodded—a little indifferently, a little coldly.
“I thought,” Sên answered gravely, “when I saw you there in the live-oak trees this afternoon, that you looked something like a Chinese girl.”
Ivy Gilbert stiffened, her eyes grew icy. Sên King-lo had been right. She did not like it at all.