So quietly had his release come to him that until a week ago no one had seen or heard it coming—no one but he.
A sudden spasm—here, too, in their garden—one afternoon had turned Ruby’s happy chatter to a cry of terror.
The clutching, grinding pain had gone almost as it came, but she had summoned doctors and wired to her cousin.
The doctors spoke of indigestion, and one who was a grandfather had patted Mrs. Sên upon her shoulder and told her that it was “quite all right.”
But Ruby Sên had seen the attack which the doctors had not, and her alarm did not pass. And King-lo bent his will and his love to comfort her alarm rather than to disabuse it.
Before Snow reached them, or the great man from Harley Street that Ruby had ’phoned for, the local doctors could make nothing of the case, and the London physician told Sir Charles frankly that he could make no more.
No other attack of pain came; but each day Sên moved a little more slowly, and his gray pallor deepened.
He took no farewells. He gave no last directions, made no last requests. He neither kept his bed nor moped. He was ready, and all that he could do for those he was leaving was in readiness.
He kept his wife’s hand in his and was her lover to the last, because he loved her and because he knew that to have him that to the utmost moment of their comradeship would be the dearest, proudest memory he could give her.
But to Sir Charles, the day after Snow came, Sên King-lo lifted a corner of his curtain.