Nancy's quick sympathy rushed to raise her father from this unseemly abasement, to prove to him that he had not sacrificed her, that he had not done wrong, not made ruin of his life or of hers. How would he survive, she wondered, when all that he had delighted in was swept away? How could she ask him, at his time of life, to make these new beginnings for her? The blind love which had been too strong for Ronald's arguments, for the indignant persuasiveness of the twins, would not let her give way even before the appeal of her father himself; for she felt that he was pleading against himself. She had never known him outside the comforts of his Chinese home, the graceful amenities in which her own pride helped her to compass his. To make him an exile from these, from the spacious mode of living which she thought of as the very marrow of his bones, the tissue of his flesh, that was a fate she was not willing, cost what it might, to bring upon him. Her own dread of the West and its alien customs made her shrink still more sensitively from dragging her father out of the peace of a home which ought to be the shelter of his failing years.
"I would be unhappy all my life, if you did this," she said. "What right have I to hear my father saying such things? How can we break the promise we have made and not be ashamed forever after? No matter where you took me, my heart would not be at peace, for I should remember that my willfulness had destroyed my father's good name. 'Shall I follow the desires of my ears and eyes and bring my parents to disgrace?' Please don't remember my foolish words," she begged. "I don't want to go to the West among strangers. What do I know about foreign customs? My father gives too much weight to my mischievous idle words. I was only wearing foreign clothes to amuse Kuei-lien and Li-an. I will never wear them again. I did not mean to trouble my father or to make him think I was unhappy."
"Are you telling me the truth?" demanded Herrick, already alarmed by the largeness of the renunciation he had proposed.
"I am telling the truth," replied Nancy, with her eyes cast down.
"But you just said you didn't really want to be married."
There was a flush in her cheeks, a faint smile on her lips.
"What maiden ever really wanted to be married?" she asked. "If you offered me all the men in the world I should say the same thing." There was a pause. "I say many, many things," she went on softly, "and sometimes my words fight against each other. You have made me so happy, you have given me so many good things, that I could not but be sad to go out from the home of my father, even if I were called to the halls of the palace itself. But ah, my father, you know that your will is mine. The tree cannot be torn up to give light to the sapling. I am not so ignorant, not so self-willed, as not to know that 'to look upon obedience as right is the law for women.' I learned that long ago. In a thousand ten thousand of years I won't forget it."
Herrick was strangely moved by this grave eloquence from the lips of his child.
"You are wiser than you ought to be," he murmured; "there is not a man on this earth fit to marry you. I don't know whether I am brave or a coward in letting you go. You will miss me, Nancy, but oh, how I shall miss you! Sometimes I wish you weren't flesh and blood, but were like the rustling of the autumn leaves in the locust trees; then I could always have you and no one would envy me."
"The locust trees lose their leaves," said the girl quietly; the poem recurred again like a persistent undercurrent to her thoughts:—