Then Emmeline Hamilton reloaded her dice and threw them again. She did it twice.
A morning paper—not one of the best reputed—announced the engagement of Sên King-lo and Miss Hamilton. No names were mentioned, but the descriptions of “a prominent Chicago clergyman’s daughter and a socially conspicuous young Chinese diplomat” were too well and accurately done to be mistakable.
Washington tittered. And the Chinese Minister’s sides shook again.
So Sên King-lo had been playing with Miss Gilbert all the time—and Emmeline Hamilton had won! For she herself had advertised her infatuation too vividly and widely for any one at all au fait with the capital’s social swimmers not to know of it—no matter what they had said a month ago. That was how most of the breakfast tables summed it up. But a handful of other individuals did not accept the situation so. Dr. Ray smiled sagely when her attention was called to the paragraph—the journal was not one which she herself read—and then the physician’s face grew grave.
“Poor girl,” she said to herself—not referring to Ivy. The erudite Latin of an uncomfortable malady had crossed her thought. And she had heard Joseph Hamilton preach—once. She had not called it “preach”; she had called it “perform.”
Sên King-lo—like all of his race, always an early riser—chanced in at the Club soon after breakfast, picked up the first sheet he saw, and caught, not his own name but the clearly pointed lines. It was not a journal taken in at the Chinese Legation.
Sên too smiled, even more coldly than Dr. Ray had, purloined the page and went leisurely off towards Judiciary Square, and, his business there done, walked a little more briskly to Massachusetts Avenue. He asked neither for Lady Snow nor for Sir Charles, but for Miss Gilbert.
Would she ride? he asked, when she came down.
She shook her head. “I wish I could. But it’s the verb ‘to be’ and the boundaries of the Sea of Marmora for me today.”
“Turn them over, lock, stock and barrel—verb, sea, children and all—to Justine. It’s a perfect day, and I very much wish you’d come,” he urged.