Miss Julia slept on a large and very elaborate bed; Sên King-lo slept on one that could not comfortably have been narrower, so narrow that even wee, ill Blanche was not lost in it, and so Spartan-plain that its new occupant considered it “horrid shabby,” and said so the first day she was well enough to take the slightest interest in anything but her own aching body. Miss Julia’s bedroom walls were covered with portraits, all but one of dead and gone Townsends, many as babies, two in their coffins: daguerreotypes, pastels, oils, water-colors, photographs, plain and colored; the one other, the largest and most handsomely framed, a portrait of Robert E. Lee in Confederate uniform. Only one picture hung on Sên King-lo’s bedroom walls—Kwan Yin-ko. And, under the doctors and Ivy herself, that Chinese Holy Mother of Mercy wrought the loving miracle of the English baby’s recovery. For Kwan Yin-ko caught the child’s roving eye almost at once and riveted it. The nurses thought it a horrible picture, and the night nurse, who had been scrupulously well brought up in Bangor, Maine, disliked being in the room with the ugly heathenish thing. But Blanche pronounced it a most beautiful lady, and Kow Li owed half his firm place in the small invalid’s heart to the skilful stories he told her of Kwan Yin-ko—and a weird jumble of mythology, fairy-tales and pure lie he made them! But they gave the English child infinite delight, and Ivy Gilbert many a refreshing half-hour of sleep out in the next room on Sên King-lo’s sofa. Sên himself slept now at his own Legation and at the Snows’. Sir Charles and his wife came and went, and so did Sên King-lo; but Ivy lived in Sên’s rooms—while Blanche stayed there. Emma Snow had begged to share Ivy’s care of the child; but her grief and anxiety made her too tearful for medical approval, and the doctors limited her comings, and the nurses speeded her departures, while Blanche, with baby ruthlessness, made it clear that it was “mine own Nivy” she wanted. The nurses had a sinecure. Miss Gilbert and yellow Kow Li usurped their office. In less than a week the night nurse and the Chinese Goddess parted company, and the day nurse went out more and more and knew well enough that she was there for a social reason, and as a fall-back-on, should the need occur, but that Ivy was in charge. And being a sensible girl, born and bred in New York and well paid, the day nurse did not care in the least. Their small encounter with half-tipsy Reginald Hamilton had marked an advance in the comradeship of the Chinese man and the English girl. It had so impelled Ivy more than it did Sên—naturally. The accident to the children drew both to a stronger liking, and Sên to a new understanding.