Ronald groaned.
"I wonder if she is going to sacrifice herself once more, just to please this old woman," he exclaimed.
The doctor had been moved by his impression of Nancy's love and also by the quiet dignity with which the sick woman bore her illness. He was a little out of patience with Ronald's remark, which sounded both hard and selfish.
"It seems foolish to you, no doubt," he said testily, "but more of her spirit would not be bad for the world. She knows her duty and is going to do it, no matter what you or I choose to say, and she thinks her old mistress is worth the sacrifice. For my part, I say more power to her arm. Pluck like that is not going to lose in the end."
"Yet the old t'ai-t'ai is going to die, isn't she?" asked Ronald.
"I should say, yes. She is very ill and pneumonia doesn't spare people at her age. But of course there is no certainty in these matters. Your friend might make her live—I have seen miracles like that before—if it were not for the fact that the old lady quite evidently thinks it is time to die and has made up her mind to die. The Chinese will do that, you know, when they grow old; sometimes their families suggest it to them because they have become feeble and a nuisance. That's a side of filial piety we don't hear advertised. But when they make up their minds to die, when they deliberately set themselves to give up the ghost,—I knew one old man who passed in ten days from sound health to the coffin,—when they do that, they are past praying for. I doubt if this old woman will live for all the doctors in the world. She seems to think she can help your friend by dying now."
"But if she dies, how will Nancy fare with the rest of the family?"
"Hm-m, I don't think she expects a very cordial time. Probably it will be spear against buckler, as the Chinese say."
"It was extraordinary," Ronald observed, beginning to pick up one by one the astonishing details of what the doctor had heard, "it was extraordinary that the t'ai-t'ai should have told Nancy to come to me."
"It was extraordinary indeed. I have never heard the like. For one of her position—in the husband's family, mind you—advising a hsi-fu to run away, that's absolutely without precedent. I don't understand it, however much she may like your friend Nancy. Of course her being a foreigner makes a big difference; the family is surely not keen on a foreign wife,—that second marriage, done so soon, proves that,—but they took her with their eyes open and they would not relish the poor compliment of her running away. Did her father, by the way, ask you first to be this girl's husband?"