It was during this time that I spoke to him of the everlastingness of love and my faith in a life farther on. "Where could death take one of us that the other could not follow?" I asked him, in strange triumph.
His eyes held mine a long minute. His face was very sad. "I am not sure of that. I have no idea of what we shall be to one another in another life. I am only sure that we are all things to each other now."
An inexpressible sense of fear took hold of me. Chan-King seemed at once terribly alien and removed; I could not speak, for I had the feeling of calling in a strange language across a great chasm. I said nothing for fear of distressing him, but he must have sensed my disquietude, for he took my hands and held them to his face and let his eyes shine upon me. "Don't look like that," he said. "We have much time yet to think of eternity." But from the day of this illness the shadow was never once removed from me.
Now we were lured by the residential charms of the French Concession, with its broad, tree-lined avenues and fresh, windswept spaces. So we took a new house in a terrace fronting on Avenue Joffre. We liked our large rooms, each with its tiled fireplace, its polished floors laid with Tientsin rugs, its electric lights. There was a grassy lawn with Chinese orchids and a border of palms and magnolias, and just around the corner from us was a public garden where, to Wilfred's delight, dozens of children played each day under the care of their respective amahs. Our staff of servants was now increased to five by the addition of a rickshaw coolie and a second amah.
Chan-King received shortly after this a letter from his father, the first communication he had had from his family since our marriage. It contained an invitation to return home for a visit, since his mother wished very deeply to see him again.
"I can interpret this in only one way, Margaret," he said in a puzzled tone. "It is an offer of reconciliation. That means that they do not know you are with me."
"Go and see for yourself what it is," I told him. For I would have consented, for his sake, to a reconciliation on almost any terms. I had seen enough of Chinese family life to understand the powerful bonds of affection and interest that bind the clan together, and I felt in my own heart the cruelty of breaking those between mother and son and brother and brother.
"I want to tell them about you," Chan-King answered. "This is my opportunity."
Before accepting their invitation, Chan-King wrote and told them that his wife was with him. And their replies to this proved him right in his first surmise. His family knew he had returned to China and, having heard nothing further of his marriage, had supposed that it was all over. This was not exactly a surprising conclusion for them to reach. More than one foreign woman has refused to accompany her Chinese husband home. I myself came in contact with an occasional half-household, in which a Chinese was held in China by his business affairs while his wife waited for him on the other side of the world. Sometimes, too, she did not wait, and the marriage ended in the conventional way—that is, in the divorce court. Chan-King's people imagined that something of the sort had occurred to him, and were quite ready to wipe out old scores and resume the ties of relationship.