"Yes, you shall knock your head," she cried. With her strong arms she bent Li-an to the earth.
"Knock, knock, knock," she shouted as she thumped the head of her victim against the ground. "Now you will see if I am a mock-empress or not."
Edward intervened and Li-an fled screaming to her mother, in whom the attack awakened all the old jealousy of these children who carried themselves superior to her own daughter. The t'ai-t'ai went to see Herrick about the affair.
"Nancy is growing up and getting silly notions," she told him. "Why don't you send her back to her own people? A girl as big as she is should be engaged. No one here can control her."
Herrick listened in annoyance.
"What do you know about these things?" he asked testily. "Don't I know what is best for my own daughter? You take children's quarrels too seriously. English girls never marry so young. You look after the behavior of your own child and we shan't have these disturbances."
The t'ai-t'ai took the rebuke in silence. But she knew as certainly as though he had spoken the words that her English husband was only trying to conceal his perplexity.
She had touched upon a sore spot. If he had no plan to suggest she must think of one, lest two foreign children, like tiger cubs reared for pets, swallow their playmates of the nursery.