Nancy and Edward knew the time was not opportune for questioning their father. But when they were home again and safe in their own quarter, their tongues seethed with comments on this meeting. Kuei-lien and the old amah joined in the discussion and were able to supply more details about the men, who were members of a party, it seemed, that was occupying a large bungalow in one of the valleys some distance beyond. It was a settlement, in fact, to which foreigners came in the summer. There were women too, said the nurse, and girls dressed in foreign clothes; "just like your mother," she continued, "but oh no, not so beautiful, and not such splendid clothes."
She went into rapt ecstasies on the subject of Nancy's mother, how she looked when the Admiral came, and what she said, and the way she wore her jewels, till Nancy, who had listened to these discursions many times and knew that the garrulous record always veered round to distasteful details of her own infancy, how she had given her bottle to the dog or used the Consul's top-hat for a lavatory, cut the nurse short by asking how she could get a glimpse of these Western girls.
The amah looked suspiciously at Kuei-lien, whom she did not trust.
"No, I'm afraid your father would not like it."
"Oh, I don't think he would mind, if you didn't boast about it," interposed Kuei-lien.
"You ask him," said the nurse, scenting danger for her children in the affable assurances of the concubine.
Kuei-lien and Nancy had not been cordial since the affair of the kiss. Kuei-lien had the long memory of her race, a memory quite prepared to avenge insults on the third and fourth generation if no earlier chance came, and she had not forgotten Nancy's slighting words. The score, in fact, had been increased by the new kindliness between Herrick and his children; this kindliness seemed to grow at the cost of her own hold upon the father. Since her ascendancy began this had been the first falling away of Herrick's affection.
The concubine, knowing too well the hazards of an old man's fickleness, did not propose risking her mastery merely to indulge the claims of two children. With all her bent for headstrong passion she was a cool creature, resourceful, intelligent, able not only to captivate the heart of her elderly husband by daring use of beauty, but to calculate to a nicety the effects she meant to achieve. She wished place, position, power, desirable ends toward which Herrick's infatuation could assist. She knew the force of the proverb that there is no fool like an old one and played cleverly on its truth, that, when the time should come, when Herrick had gone and her friend the t'ai-t'ai, then the despised fifth wife should be enjoying the harvest she had sowed.
But the place of Nancy and Edward in the household economy had puzzled her. They stood in the way of her success, for, like all Westerners, they followed a disturbing logic of their own and did not yield to the good old precedents of the Orient. She had not sat back with arms folded, however, like the t'ai-t'ai, resigning the problem to fate. Fate was indiscriminate as lightning in the way it struck, a very clumsy agent for nice ends. Kuei-lien believed in the art of directing fate, and now, after her study of Nancy and Edward, she had come to one certainty—that they must be returned to the West whence they had come.
She was glad, then, to hear of their encounter with two Englishmen. Kuei-lien knew by hearsay the free and easy intercourse by which Western men and maids fostered romance; what she had learned considerably overshot the mark, allowing it to seem all the more plausible that here was an easy way for disposing of Nancy. So she renewed her friendliness with the girl, doing her best to laugh away the morbid accident of the kiss. Their relations were never quite so comfortable as before; but the child was young and excited by her first glimpse of two strangers, and she was curious enough to hear eagerly all that Kuei-lien suggested.