Sên came back presently from beyond the tomatoes and the cucumbers, walking briskly, tuning a banjo as he came.
He sat down on the veranda steps, at Miss Julia’s feet, and began thrumming an old camp-meeting song. Ivy Gilbert thought the words preposterous, but the lilt was very pretty—and Miss Julia beat time softly on the porch railing with her tortoise-shell lorgnette—and Miss Julia joined in the chorus. Every one did—except Ivy Gilbert. He sang “My Old Dutch”—Ivy knew that; and he sang a darky love-song. How could he do that? Then he started Harry Lauder’s London latest. And the English girl, who never had heard of China’s Yellow Sorrow or of Omi or of Marco Polo, had heard of Harry Lauder.
Miss Julia hinted deftly at “goodnight” with, “And now the best for the last. One of your own!”
Sên King-lo made the borrowed banjo wail like a soft wind that grieved and trembled in the moonlight—and then drifted words into the accompaniment that the girl fancied he was improvising.
“There is some one of whom I keep a-thinking;
There is some one whom I visit in my dreams,
Though a hundred hills stand sentinel between us,
And the dark rage of a hundred sunless streams.
For the same bright moon is kind to us.
And the same untrammeled wind to us.