They carried the children up to Sên’s rooms—the constables protesting and suggesting the ambulance. But they accepted Ivy’s, “I am their cousin,” Sên King-lo’s more imperative, “’Phone for their father —Sir Charles Snow—British Embassy;—Massachusetts Avenue, if he’s gone home. I am taking them to my rooms.” And the policeman who had seen Sên holding the demented ponies even put his finger up to his helmet. CHAPTER XXVII Dick, more frightened than hurt, was carried home that same night; but wee Blanche was badly hurt, and the doctor would not allow them to move her. The wound on her head was a bad one, her little arm was broken, one baby leg crushed, and most of all the doctors, who came and went hourly, feared internal injuries they could not gage and dare not probe yet. For two weeks the child lay swathed and drugged in Sên King-lo’s bed. And Ivy never left her. Even in her drugged stupor—she was too weak for them to drug her heavily—she stirred and whimpered if her cousin went from her. Two nurses were installed, but only from Ivy would the stricken mite take mixture or suffer touch. She looked at her father with hard, hurt eyes; she scarcely noticed her mother; she turned her face from the kindly doctors; hated the nurses, and said so; and it must have gone hard with Ivy for a snatch of food and rest, had Blanche not taken a sudden fancy to Kow Li. She screamed if Ivy moved from her side, unless Kow Li took the cousin’s place. She even fretted after a short half-hour and called for Ivy; and when she did, the girl always came. But, thanks to Kow Li, Miss Gilbert did get half-hour snatches of rest in the next room: Sên King-lo’s living room, his Chinese books about it, traces of him everywhere, and as much an atmosphere of China as if it had been in Pekin. Why that was so would be hard to say, but it was. Almost all the sparse furnishing was Western: easy-chairs and chesterfield, many books, and water-colors mostly English. There were no bamboos, pictured or real—not a dragon nor a joss-stick. But the room breathed China, and a girl’s sensitiveness caught it, as only one visitor had before: Sir Charles. And he had lived in China. After the first frightened hour’s absorption she had realized poignantly that these were Mr. Sên’s rooms—the intimate place of his being and keeping, as true of him and as redolent of him as Rosehill was of Miss Julia.