The story of Reginald Hamilton’s last ride in Washington never got out.
His horse found its way back to its stable, quite uninjured, and that,
plus a check for a bill never before too promptly paid, satisfied the
liveryman who owned it. Unlike Washington society, he was not curious.
And neither Ivy nor Sên King-lo told any one—for some weeks not even
Sir Charles. Had Hamilton stayed on in Washington, probably both his
cousin and their friend would have felt that Snow must be told—that he,
the only man in America who had a right to do it, might stand between
the girl and any further advances of the Reginald. But a week after his
descent to the snow-thick road, Reginald and his sister, together,
though not on speaking terms, betook them to Chicago.
Reginald Hamilton had been away from Washington for a few days when
Emmeline had achieved her newspaper _coup_; and on his return, after the
ill-fated paragraph’s contradiction, she had managed to prevent him from
attempting a tardy intervention. But he had heard all about it, of
course; and, though not quite dull enough to doubt that the invention
had been Emmeline’s, with intention and hope behind it, it had
humiliated as well as enraged him; and this, added to his thwarted and
growing passion for Ivy, had swung him quite off his balance of mind and
breeding, never very secure. And his outrageous and, because futile,
absurd behavior had been, at least in part, a demented blow struck in
his sister’s defense. He, craven though he was, would have slain
Emmeline himself before he’d have seen her married to a Chinese; but he
was infuriated that Chinese Sên King-lo had scorned the hint which, as
Hamilton (and all Washington) knew, Emmeline more than once had given.
By mid-January the rumors that had smirched Sên’s name had died away and
made room for others about some one else. Washington society has too
many sensations to dawdle long over one—and too many great interests to
quite lose its head over things that are in truth as uninteresting as
they are vicious and petty.
Sên still rode and walked with Ivy, had long Anglo-Chinese conferences
with Snow, still played with Dick and Blanche, sometimes carrying them
off to have several hours of high-jinks in his own rooms. Sir Charles
went there sometimes, and Emma Snow had had tea there with Sên King-lo
twice and had lunched there once with Sên and Miss Julia: a very great
and unmerited honor for Sên, Uncle Lysander thought. Kow Li had a
different opinion which he kept to himself.
Ivy had not been invited. Mary Withrow and Lucille Smith wondered why.
Emma Snow and Dr. Ray, who still was in Washington, thought they knew,
but, like Kow Li, each kept her opinion strictly to herself.
A great English statesman was the lion of the January hour. His name was
world-known, and he had married a minor royalty. He was staying with the
Snows, and Lady Snow’s big drawing-room was insufficient for her
callers.
Sir Charles and his wife had gone with the Duke to the White House an
hour ago, and Sên King-lo and Ivy were looking at the confession her
cousin’s guest had written just before dinner; the first contribution of
that sort she had asked for since Sên’s.
“That reminds me,” she said, as he closed the book, and she took it from
him and opened it again, turning the pages until she found his, “I’ve
always meant to ask you or Charlie and always forgotten to do it—I’ve
such a sieve of a head.” She laid her finger below the character that
stood for a woman’s name. “Will you pronounce it for me?”
Sên spoke the Chinese word.
She made him repeat it and tried to say it after him.
“Oh, it would take me years! What an appalling language!” She laughed at
him. “But I like your favorite name, Mr. Sên. I like its sound when you
say it. I think it is beautiful.”
“The most beautiful word in the world to me,” Sên said—“the most
beautiful name in the world. We Chinese are said to crave only sons. But
as long as I can remember, my heart’s desire has been to have a daughter
whose mother would let me give her that name.”
He spoke quite simply, for all his English training, too Chinese to feel
any mawkish hesitancy in speaking to a friend, a girl he respected, of
life’s best realities. Something that hurt a little, something new and
strange, pricked at Ivy Gilbert’s heart.
Sên King-lo’s wife! His Chinese wife! She had never thought of her. She
always had thought of him as just Sên King-lo—the Sên King-lo she knew
and liked and talked with and rode with—unmarried, here in Washington
to stay. More often than not she forgot that he was not English, more
alien than she was, alien very differently from her. Of course he’d go
back to China—and marry there—some day. Why not? How silly she was!
_All_ Chinese married. She didn’t know much about them, but she knew
that much. Had his ancestors worn pig-tails? Even his own father,
perhaps! It was a horrid thought. She looked up from the Chinese page of
her book to the Chinese man on the other side of the small, low table
between them, a sudden fear, a revulsion, in her young English eyes—and
looked down again very quickly.
“Of course you couldn’t write it in English,” she spoke a little
breathlessly; “you had to leave the space blank. There isn’t any English
name for the Chinese name, of course. You couldn’t translate it.”
“No,” he told her, “that was not the reason. There is an English
translation for many Chinese names—and this is one. I have written it
in English—once or twice,” he added with a smile that neither he nor
she understood.
“Then why—” she began.
“It was my girl-mother’s name, Miss Gilbert, and I love it for that,
even far more than I do for the music it makes—it _is_ music in _my_
language and in yours. It was the last word my father ever spoke.”
“I beg your pardon,” Ivy told him shyly. “I’m so sorry. Of course, you
wouldn’t write it in my confession-book.”
“But I did. I wrote it in Chinese. I’ll write it now in English, if
you’ll let me. I didn’t when I wrote the English pages, because I could
not take that liberty with _your_ name.”
“My——”
Sên King-lo’s eyes kindled into hers. “My mother’s name”—his lips
seemed to caress it as he spoke it—“was Ruby.”
_And then the girl knew._