"He much frightened. No come out."
The man felt the door which Nancy was still keeping securely fastened.
"Ah, she doesn't trust you ecclesiastical gentry," he said. "Call her, my lad; tell her she's safe."
"Nancy," shouted Edward in Chinese, "it's all right now! You can open the door. There are two big foreigners here. The old turnip doesn't dare hurt us."
The monk gave Edward a wicked look. The boy rejoiced to see that his thrust had gone home and referred to the priest in several other terms of choice abuse, a partial revenge which his enemy had no means of countering. The Englishmen stood innocently by, unconscious of how Edward was settling scores with the monk, till at last the grating of bars told them that the prisoner was reassured. The door opened and Nancy stood before them, white and startled.
CHAPTER IX
Neither man forgot this picture of Nancy in the doorway. The quick look of surprise she gave them was not swift enough to banish traces of the terror she had been suffering, so that they cherished a continuing memory of the color in her startled eyes before she looked down, confused by the gaze of two strangers. And her blush of embarrassment was too slow to hide the glowing whiteness of her skin, a whiteness accentuated by the sumptuous disorder of dark hair. The girl kept a nervous grip upon the panels of the door; she stood tiptoe, her body poised for flight; the narrow slope of her shoulders, the fullness of her thighs, the slender ankles, to which the simple costume of jacket and trousers did admirable justice, suggested a figure graceful rather than dainty, a healthy coherence of nerves and muscles ready to express with full pliability the lightest promptings of her mind. She was a creature through whose veins life ran bravely.
Not till Edward took his sister affectionately by the hand did she relax. One of the men, at least, watching the haunted look slowly subside from her face, realized that the boy's story, after all, had not been so wildly unlikely: there had been more at issue than payment for a cup of tea. His suspicion would have been amply confirmed if he had seen the greediness in the face of the monk, a stare of thwarted exasperation which a lifetime of copying the placid Lord Buddha did nothing to erase. Nancy saw it and turned away.
"Well, tea has been your undoing, my children," said the more whimsical of the two Englishmen, "now let tea make amends. Sit down and let's drain the pot. I've got twenty cents for your ransom and twenty cents more for ours, so have no fear. They can hardly lock up the four of us."