"There, there!" said her master soothingly. "Your motherly heart would never turn away a poor orphan from our door!"
But Mrs. Barbara sniffed herself out of the room, and it was weeks before she reconciled herself to the new and disagreeable prospect.
Indeed, when poor, shivering Ah Lon arrived at Old Studley, the good woman nearly swooned at the spectacle of a little visitor arrayed in dark blue raiment consisting of a long, square-shaped jacket and full trousers, and a bare head stuck over with well-oiled queues of black hair.
"I thought as Mr. William wrote it was a girl, sir!" she gasped faintly, with a shocked face.
But the old professor was in ecstasies. All he could think of was the fact that under his roof was a being who could converse in pure Chinese; in truth, poor bewildered Ah Lon could not speak in anything else but her native tongue. He would have carried her off to his study and monopolised her, but Mrs. Barbara's sense of propriety was fired.
"No, sir," she interposed firmly. "If that being's the girl Mr. William sent she's got to look as such in some of Miss Jinty's garments and immediately."
So Ah Lon, trembling like a leaf, was carried off to be attired like a little English child.
"But as for looking like one, that she never will!" Mrs. Barbara hopelessly regarded the strangely-wide little yellow face, the singular eyes narrow as slits, and the still more singular eyebrows.
"Oh, never mind how she looks!" Jinty put her arms round the little yellow neck and lovingly kissed the stranger, who summarily shook her off. Perhaps Ah Lon was not accustomed to kisses at home.
It was a rebuff, and Jinty got many another as the days went on. Do what she could to please and amuse the little foreigner, Ah Lon shrank from her persistently.