“Well,” his wife conceded bitterly, “that’s something. Not glad! Wait till you see it, Charles Snow! ‘Finest race on earth!’ Well, perhaps they are, but—” She finished the sentence and began another, but the rest of her words were quite inarticulate through the thick smother of fresh sobbing.
“Boy or girl?”
The commonplace and very usual question seemed to steady her.
“That’s the worst of it,” she answered desperately but clearly. “It’s a girl.”
CHAPTER LIV
Ruby Sên did not hate her Chinese baby. And because she did not King-lo loved her with an added love.
Ruby loved her baby. It was hers—and Lo’s!
Ruby Sên had a valiant soul, and something of Sên King-lo’s valor and sweetness had crept into hers.
Mrs. Sên loved her wee daughter very much.
Sên King-lo loved his baby girl almost as tenderly as he loved the mother he had never seen. Once, in the demanding day of early wifehood when Ruby had asked him, as wives foolishly will, pathetically must, if his love of her was his great love, he had told her simply, bravely, “No Chinese loves any one else as he does his mother.”