“The nun!” “She was not a nun when I knew her,” Charles Snow said. “I have seen your mother, too, Sên King-lo,” he added presently, “both as a girl in her father’s home and as a wife in her husband’s.” “I never saw her!” Sên Ruby’s son said sadly. “They were very alike—the sisters.” “Very,” Sên agreed. “I have a miniature of my mother, here in my rooms, that might almost be this. My father gave it to me, from his robe, as he died.” “They were painted by the same brush,” Snow told him. “I have seen _your_ miniature, Sên King-lo. Their father trusted me, and so did yours.” Sên gave his English friend a filial look. “I am going to tell you the story. I thought it was shut away in my own keeping forever, but I am going to tell it to you—now.” “If you’d rather not——” “I’d much rather not. But I must. I am going to tell you what I’d far rather keep an old locked sweetness—a far away thing, but my own—going to tell it in my final attempt to save you and my cousin from the hideous mistake and life-long misery from which your grandfather saved me and his daughter years ago.” The two children’s voices in happy clamor rang out in the hall, and their mother’s voice joined in, laughing. “I have loved but two women, desired but two, in all my life, Sên King-lo.” “I, only one,” the Chinese said gravely. “You are young,” the older man told him, gently, a kindly twinkle in his blue eyes. “I love my wife very dearly, Sên——” “I know that, sir.” And he knew also that, whatever this unexpected story which Charles Snow was about to entrust to him, there was no discredit in it—a perfumed breath of the long-ago, no slightest stench of any time or place. Sir Charles Snow told it slowly—pausing again and again—striking a match, drawing a whiff of smoke from his cigarette. It is not easy for Englishmen to tell such stories at all. “The second year I was in China, I spent two months in a monastery that lay on the edge of your grandfather’s place—a friend or two with me for part of the time, for the rest alone. The monks had an excellent cook—or one of them was—and a good bottle or two. They, good men, were no sour zealots.” Sên King-lo smiled. “I came and went as I would and did as I liked. It was liberty-hall for me, that old monk-kept inn, in the pines on the hill. There were no other guests. It was rest and peace and relaxation—perfect that—until I held a Chinese girl in my arms. Yes, King-lo, I have held a Chinese nun in my arms—and,” a queer, tender smile in his grave eyes, “your mother, too.” But Sên King-lo only smiled back with a tranquil face.