“You’ll have to excuse me, Dick,” Ivy refused. “Mr. Sên will pour beautifully, I’m sure.”
“Dere’s doin’ to be muffens,” Blanche announced proudly.
But Ivy stood firm. “Not even for crumpets! Ba. You are a hero, Mr. Sên.” And she left them.
Sên bowed gravely and returned to the floor, and as she crossed the hall she heard the great top spin.
The children squealed with delight, but Sên King-lo smothered a sigh.
How desirable she’d looked there in the doorway—though even in his mind he did not consciously word it like that—the girl in her silvery steel-trimmed gown, violets at her breast, and in the picture hat that shaded her brunette face and was tied with violet ribbons under her dimpled, mutinous chin. He had never desired her more—and never had he desired her less—though it never yet had occurred to him that he, intensely Chinese, desired her at all: the girl who had no affection for children, no share in their fresh little pleasures, no tenderness for the baby-lives that were of her own near kindred.
And Emma Snow, who noticed most things, and chattered and laughed over many, noticed—and said nothing about it—that for many days Sên King-lo sent no lilies-of-the-valley to Ivy.
CHAPTER XX
Emmeline Hamilton was silly—decadent even but she was far from stupid. She made her move at once now, but she made it deftly and unbiased or hampered by anything that Reginald had said or that he felt.
Rumor began to scratch and tear at Sên King-lo, and it did not leave Ivy Gilbert quite unscotched—though, for a time, it left her unsmirched.