“I hate you, Pan!” muttered Pat on one such occasion.
Happily Pan did not hear him. She was serenely singing:
“Yesu love me, t’is I know,
For the Bible tell me so.”
But though a little seraph in the matter of singing hymns and repeating verses, Pan, for a small Chinese girl, was very mischievous. Indeed, she was the originator of most of the mischief which Pat carried out with such spirit. Nevertheless, when Pat got into trouble, Pan, though sympathetic, always had a lecture for him. “Too bad, too bad! Why not you be good like me?” admonished she one day when he was suffering “consequences.”
Pat looked down upon her with wrathful eyes.
“Why,” he asked, “is bad people always so good?”
III
The child of the white woman, who had been given a babe into the arms of the wife of Lum Yook, was regarded as their own by the Chinese jeweller and his wife, and they bestowed upon him equal love and care with the little daughter who came two years after him. If Mrs. Lum Yook showed any favoritism whatever, it was to Pat. He was the first she had cradled to her bosom; the first to gladden her heart with baby smiles and wiles; the first to call her Ah Ma; the first to love her. On his eighth birthday, she said to her husband: “The son of the white woman is the son of the white woman, and there are many tongues wagging because he lives under our roof. My heart is as heavy as the blackest heavens.”