"That is no answer," exclaimed Ronald.
He was annoyed by the girl's obstinacy, which she had inherited in too full measure from her father.
"You surely can be frank with me," he added, "because I may never again be in such a position to help you. You know that I have your father's estate to divide. As long as the money, which includes ten thousand taels which were to be paid at your wedding, as long as this remains in my hands I can make almost any terms you may wish with the t'ai-t'ai. But when it has been divided, then my power will be gone. Now do you regret your bargain? Are you sorry you kept to this marriage? Do tell me now, when I can help you."
He had realized Nancy's stubbornness; he had not measured her pride.
"My marriage is what I expected," she answered.
How could she tell him the shame of the last three days? How could she relate the scornful treatment of her new family? She might have told Kuei-lien; she had no words to speak of it to Ronald. She could not run to him like a weakling tired of her promise. To endure the mischances of her marriage was no more than keeping faith with her father's good name. She was a wife; that was the end of it. But Ronald seemed to read her thoughts.
"I don't know what your new home is like," he argued, "but I do know what you are like, and I can hardly imagine you happy under the conditions you will find there. Just now your sorrow for your father makes everything else seem of small account, but the time will come when the sharpness will wear off and you will have to think of the man you have married and the life you have adopted. For it is an adopted life; it is not natural to you. Now your father is dead, don't make a mistake of your loyalty to him and think you have to embrace years of misery merely to gratify his memory. That's not good enough. They don't want you—I can see that; they only want the money that was promised with you. Nothing would please them better than to get this money without the necessity of taking you. You are a foreigner and always will be a foreigner to them. Can't you come home with Edward and me, and I will promise, if I have to move heaven and earth, to get your marriage annulled."
"If they want my money, they have to take me," said Nancy stubbornly.
She was not doing justice to Ronald's proposal, while the man, in his turn, was far from seeing her marriage as she saw it. She could not appreciate how in his foreign eyes her marriage was no marriage, nor could he see how to her Chinese eyes it was a bond from which there was but one honorable escape for the wife, the extreme measure of suicide. Ronald had been reading deeply in the customs of the Chinese the better to understand Nancy's case, but he missed the essential fact of her attitude, the value she set by her good name. To have run away because she was displeased with her first three days of wedded life seemed an act of intolerable cowardice. Nancy's every thought was Chinese, more Chinese than Kuei-lien's: she had an inbred fear of disgrace, not only for her own sake but for her father's whose reputation rested helplessly in her care. So she met Ronald's most persuasive entreaties with the same blank answer. If she had grounds for quarreling with her husband or with his parents it was no business of an outsider to know of them.
At last Ronald despaired of moving her. He gave up the attempt. He was as sure as he was sure of his own love for the girl that she was unhappy in her new home and would grow week by week unhappier, but she was less responsive to his words now than before her marriage. He threw down his hands with a hopeless gesture, inwardly cursing the folly of Timothy Herrick, which was able to survive him in such fatuously obdurate wrong-headedness. Nancy's white, troubled face reminded him of his first glimpse of her in the temple. How much greater was her danger to-day than in that first perilous meeting. How much less he could help her. Unable to leave the girl without one sign of his deep overmastering passion, he crossed the room and kissed her gently on the forehead.