“I worshiped him for what he had spared his mother,” Sên King-lo said simply.
“He certainly looks a changeling, even for a child of Ivy’s,” Elenore Ray said musingly. “Atavism is intensely interesting—and very baffling.” She added, “What is it that is troubling you, nagging you, then!—if I may know?”
“You have used the one right word, Dr. Ray, ‘nagging.’ When the messages—there were two—came that called me to China, I tried to come alone; but my wife would not let me.”
“No, of course,” the woman said regretfully. “Must you be here long—in China?”
So she knew, had divined, what his trouble was, understood half of his dual trouble—for Sên King-lo was carrying two, and they were quite distinct—knew without any need of being told! But because she had asked him, and because it was a relief to speak to one he so trusted and liked, of what he could not have spoken to any one else, unless perhaps to Charles Snow, Sên King-lo went on.
“As short a time as I can make it,” he replied. “She wanted to bring our boy with us, of course; but there I would not yield, and our physician backed me up.”
“Wonderful people, doctors!” the physician remarked, “and beautifully helpful.”
Sên smiled his agreement. “But I ought not to have brought her,” he added gravely. “It was a terrible risk, an unpardonable mistake, and I do not see how I am to save her from finding it out. No one avoided us in London. No one resented our marriage, or dared to misunderstand it. She was too fine, too unmistakable—and a little because I was so seemingly cosmopolitan, and because London is London—at once indifferent and wholesome. But here it is not so.”
“Has Mrs. Sên been ostracized here?”
“Something like that. The Europeans have been supercilious—salacious-minded and evil-tongued amongst themselves and behind our backs, I have little doubt. And my own people have been hard, unbending. The English sneer, more or less openly, and the Chinese have tabooed my wife. An Englishman, a married man who also has a Chinese ménage and children in it, called here one day when I was out, and Ruby gave him tea; but I happen to know that he has forbidden his wife, an Englishwoman, to call on mine.”