“It is for Ivy,” King-lo went on, “that I fear most. Mere baby that she is, I know she is English. Yes, I am right. She is as English as Ruben is Chinese, more so perhaps. The mixture of race bloods has modified nothing racial for either of our children—fomented and intensified rather. Ivy is wholly English. I can see it every day. Sometimes when I have been alone, not often but sometimes, I have said something in Chinese—just to hear the Chinese words, just to taste them on my lips. I did, not long ago, when I was nursing her. She didn’t like it. She loathed it.”
That sounded fantastic—but Sir Charles did not think so. He had lived too long in China!
“An English girl with a Chinese face, an English soul and mind in a Chinese body! What she’ll probably have to live through! I beseech the gods that she may never marry!”
Sir Charles Snow noticed the plural.
“An English girl in a Chinese body!” Sên’s voice broke as he said it. And he said no more.
“I will do my best,” Snow told him.
It was enough.
The specialist came again from London the next day, and again he spoke alone with Snow after he had seen Sên King-lo.
“I am completely in the dark,” the great man said bitterly. “Mr. Sên is dying—I can’t say how soon—but dying, if I know anything at all about my business. We doctors have to doubt that now and then, unless we are complete asses. I know that Mr. Sên is dying, or I think I do, because I can see that there is no grip on life left in him; but I have not the remotest idea what is killing him, and that’s flat. There’s been a touch of heart trouble—no indigestion about it—but I suppose those fellows here had to call it something, and no wonder they barked up the wrong tree. I’ve been puzzled before—a doctor lives in one big maze of puzzle—but I never ran up against a puzzle like this before. Never! There has been a touch of heart trouble, but not enough to kill any man—scarcely enough to kill a mouse. I’d give a limb to know what is killing Mr. Sên.”