His old friends would not have recognized their slim debonair acquaintance of former years in the portly gentleman who was presiding over this classroom. There were more alterations than dress could account for, more alterations than the exchange of tweeds and flannels for flowered silk could explain. The Chinese dress with its gown of pale blue silk and its jacket of cut velvet was the more picturesque, but to those who had known the careless elegance of the past there must be apparent a marked falling off in pride of appearance, hints of slovenliness, in proof of which it was hard, none the less, to cite any convincing detail. Nor could increased age explain why an Englishman known for his alertness, his quick tact, had given way to the heavy pompousness of the mandarin. The rotund belly, the puffy cheeks, the bristling moustache seemed to betray a man whose heart was cowardly, who was trying to disguise by his bluff exterior the real truth, that he had relaxed his standards and amended his life to the pleasures that were easily obtained.
Nancy went through her lessons with an unobliging surliness which Herrick could not but see. He met his daughter's defiance in the same spirit. Herrick had been autocrat so long that it was abnormally hard for him to see mishaps from any side but his own. He was angry and aggrieved at last night's mistake, but more because it had put him to ridicule than because he could conceive the force of the shock to Nancy's pride. It was preposterous to have been fooled thus into kissing his own daughter; Herrick was thoroughly annoyed by his own loss of face; but what right had the girl to sit in judgment over her own father, as she seemed all too palpably to be doing? What right had she even to think of finding fault? His conduct was not hers to criticize. The kiss was only a kiss, nothing to her to brood about; but her temerity in spying upon her father, that struck at the very roots of obedience.
"Nancy, I have a few words to say to you," he said, beckoning Edward to go. The girl rose. Herrick did not like the candor of her clear eyes.
"Has your teacher taught you to stare at your father?" he asked sharply.
Nancy looked down, but not humbly. Herrick surveyed her with a curious detachment. Ought she not to kneel, he wondered—the precedents for Chinese behavior failed him at times. Perhaps it was enough that she should stand. There was no harm, at least, in allowing a few moments of silence to make his ensuing words impressive. So he turned to his water pipe and gurgled a few puffs of blue smoke while the daughter remained in rigid but none the less sullen attention. At last the man ended the silence with well-chosen Chinese phrases.
"I ordered your lessons this morning," he began, "because I wished to see by your behavior whether you were ashamed of the very great offense you have done. For a daughter to spy upon her father—that is unpardonable. You are sixteen; I am fifty. What I do is no concern of yours; what I do you cannot be expected to understand. Your place is in your own room at night; it is a scandal for you to be anywhere else. Yet I find you following me around, causing me shame by your immodest curiosity; and not only that, but all this morning you have sat here stiff-necked, stubborn, seeming to reproach me, as though I were answerable to you for my conduct. What excuse can you offer for your shameless behavior?"
"I was not spying," replied Nancy.
"You were not spying? Then what were you doing there at two o'clock in the morning?"
"I could not sleep. I was looking at the moonlight."
To allow such an excuse would have undermined Herrick's just cause for anger. He could not hear of it.