From the window she saw his dim figure crossing the court. At the gate house he paused and called aloud.
Two of the servants came; she could see their quaintly colored paper lanterns bobbing about. One of them went into the gate house and came out again. He was struggling with something. She strained her eyes against the glass. Oh. yes—he was getting into his long coat; that was all. Apparently he went out, this man, with her father.... The other colored lantern bobbed back into the gate house, and the compound settled again into calm.
Doane, though he could not talk with his daughter, could talk directly and bluntly to the man named Brachey, who had rushed out here incontinent after her He knew this; was alive with a slow swelling anger that came to him as a perverse sort of blessing after the cumulative emotional torment of the past three days.
CHAPTER XIII—THE PLEDGE
1
ON the morning of that same day—while Griggsby Doane was striding down the mountain road from So T'ung to T'ainan-fu—Jonathan Brachey sat in his room at the inn trying to read, trying to write, counting the minutes until two o'clock at which hour Betty would be waiting in the tennis court, when John slipped in with a small white card bearing the printed legend, in English:
MR. PO
Interpreter and Secretary