Sên let himself in quietly; the doctors forbade knocking or
ringing—Blanche _might_ be asleep. His sitting-room door was open, and
he glanced in cautiously as he stood in the hall, a little shyly—in
case a girl dozed or lay on the chesterfield. Lady Snow had asked him to
call here for her at three, and it was just on three.
No one was in the sitting-room. There was not a sound in the place.
So Lady Snow had succeeded in taking Miss Gilbert out for an hour, as
she’d told him she was going to try to do. And only Kow Li was in there
with Blanche, who must be sleeping, because she wasn’t talking and
neither was Kow Li.
The door into the bedroom, his own room—but Blanche’s now—also was
wide open. Sên tiptoed to it. He’d take a peep at the sleeping baby and
beckon Kow Li out, if she hadn’t clutch-hold of his hands or his sleeve
as she so often had. Sên rather thought he’d have to give Kow Li to
Blanche next Christmas.
Sên King-lo paused at the sill of his bedroom door, rooted there by a
force he never had felt before.
He _knew_.
Baby Blanche was fast asleep.
But Ivy was not.
She knelt by the bed, all the sweetness of girlhood unspoiled, all the
motherhood-love in the face she bent over the child that slept in her
cradling arms, baby head on maiden breast. And Kwan Yin-ko up on the
wall, was guarding them both.
_And Sên King-lo knew._
A great light came into his eyes. A sudden beat under his ribs made a
vein on his forehead swell and throb, quivered his lips; and all his
being rushed to the kneeling girl.
As quietly as he had come in, he turned and went, and went from the
house, an up-to-date Washington flat that was a sanctuary now.
He knew his own secret now, knew it as completely and as surely as he
had learned it suddenly.
Nature had torn a veil aside, and a man had looked in.
He had seen his own soul, and he knew that if ever life gave him a
child—a girl-child, perhaps, to bear his mother’s name—he but now had
seen its mother—an English girl kneeling beside his bed.
* * * * *
He walked away from the city, taking his course to the woods across the
river.
He knew the bar—the impossibilities—the disaster and petty, sore frets
that passionate disobedience must bring. He knew and believed all this
as no untraveled girl could. To call a halt to her heart Ivy had only
instinct and a convention for which she had lost respect—had lost it
because of what she had found in him. He had conviction, China,
thousands of years. The bar that she had come to think but inconvenience
and problem, a drawbridge of race that _might_—were the motive
enough—be lowered or raised, was to him an impenetrable, unsurmountable
wall—the Greater Wall of China, with never a breach or loophole in its
everlasting imperial masonry.
If ever his puissant, virile manhood—the wholesomeness and sweetness of
his being—the heritage his fathers had given—pulsed to manhood’s
gravest sacrament, life’s perfect fulfilment, he had seen today—there
in his room, the mate of his being, the core of his soul, his children’s
mother.
_And she was forbidden._
Did she suspect?
Could he have taught her to care? English Ruby! _English!_
_What_ was he going to do about it?
Elenore Ray could have told him.