"I can get witnesses: Mr. Beresford should do, and my brother-in-law—he is a banker. I am sure he will be useful."
"Good. Can you bring them to my house? Here is my card. I will write the address in English, if you wish. Could you come, say, at five to-morrow?"
"I am sure we could."
Herrick departed, greatly pleased at the granting of his request and not without regretful thoughts over having lost what seemed a predestined husband for Nancy. What, after all, was the training he had boasted of giving his daughter? Months had gone. Except during his spell of illness, he had scarcely seen the girl. He began to feel that he had sacrificed her for an inconsiderable point. The thought was too painful. It was better to be philosophic, to say that what was to be would be despite all the evasive twistings of little human schemes. With this comfortable casting of his burden upon fate Herrick went to sleep and did not waken till he felt his chair settle on the pavement of his own courtyard.
Promptly at five the next day Nasmith with his two witnesses drove up the narrow hutung to Herrick's star-studded gate. His news had caused a great outcry at home. He had kept in confidence the story of Herrick's offer of betrothal and how the father had threatened to marry his daughter to a Chinese. No hint had been suggested to break the shock of this grievous information. So stunned were his sister and nieces by an arrangement which seemed both wanton and abominable that Nasmith, to his own bitter amusement, found himself defending the father, trying to convince his outraged relations that there was nothing unnatural in betrothing to a Chinese a girl who had been trained, all her life, to Chinese manners, Chinese ways of life. He was a lame advocate and could only listen, with a disheartened smile, to the dozen wild plots for saving Nancy which were bandied round the table.
"If she ever has a mind to it, she will save herself," was the best comfort he could offer.
"Do you know the way Chinese women save themselves?" asked his brother-in-law grimly. "At the bottom of a well."
Nasmith cheerfully would have strangled Mr. Ferris for this ill-chosen remark.
At five the next day Herrick received his three guests. They went curiously through the draughty hallways, the wintry courtyards, to the room their host had prepared for them.
"Here is the document," he said, offering them a piece of carefully inscribed foolscap. "Will you read it? I think it is properly phrased. I spent twenty years in the Customs, you know, and did my turn at writing dispatches."