She plunged bravely into her story. Her information had come from one or another of her maids. And she had overheard gossip among the mandarins. The throne had sent her father the silken cord. She could not discover why. To be sure they called him a secondary devil, meaning one who sympathised with the foreigners. The reactionary Manchus at Peking, reveling and plotting within the sacred walls of the Forbidden City, remembered nothing, it appeared, of the recent past. The eunuchs, always the stormy petrels of China's darkest days, were again in power at the palace; the great empress dowager, she whom all China termed, half-affectionately, “the Old Buddha,” had given them their head, and now this new young empress with all the arrogance of the Old Buddha and none of her genius for power or her profound experience, was running wild. And as a consequence, Kang Yu, the statesman who more than any other was equipped to counsel her wisely during this stormy time, was returning to the home of his ancestors to die by his own hand. It would be said at the Forbidden City that a gracious empress dowager had “permitted” him to go.... Doane's disturbed thoughts darted back over the bloodstained recent history of Manchu officialdom. The Old Buddha had “permitted” Ch'i Ying, late Manchu Viceroy of Canton, to slay himself; and had graciously extended the same privilege to others after the Boxer trouble of the year 1900, among them an acquaintance of Doane's, Chao Shu-ch'iao. Others she had decapitated--Yuan Ch'ang, Li Shan, Controller of the Household, and Hsu Ching, President of the Board of War. She killed, too, Hsu Ching-Ch'eng, who, like Kang, had held the post of minister in more than one of the capitals of Europe. The only known charge against this Hsu was that he had come to admire foreign customs. In her narrative the girl spoke only English. Her voice was deep in quality, without heaviness; musical, like most voices among the better-to-do in the Middle Kingdom, Chinese and Manchu alike. And, colored now with deep emotion, it had an appealing quality to which Doane found a response--difficult, at the moment, to repress--among his own emotions. He sensed, too, with a pleasure that was, in his lonely life, stirring, the naiveté of her Western feeling. Standing here in simple native costume, in the heart of old China, gazing wistfully out over the tangled hundreds of sleeping junks and sampans, this girl, freshly out of a Massachusetts college, was pleading against hope that her father might be spared the final jealous vengeance of the mightiest remaining Oriental throne.