No one looked at them with unpleasant surprise. London has an easy grace of the darker strangers within her imperial gates. And Mrs. Sên soon realized that in Mayfair there was more distinction than disgrace in being the English wife of Sên King-lo. And, whatever they thought or felt about it there, they were very kind to Mrs. Sên at Portland Place where the five-colors flag flew. She made his Chinese friends welcome and was sweetly cordial to them, and most of them liked her. The Chinese in London grow in numbers, and there are many of a birth and class that do not affiliate with Limehouse. But their home and home-life were English. Kwan Yin-ko hung beside their bed, and an old Chinese miniature of an older “Ruby” was locked away in Sên King-lo’s own “den.” But there was nothing else Chinese in the house. Few smart houses in Hampstead, Mayfair, Chelsea or Kensington but had more Chinese curios than the Sêns’ had. It was both kind and wise of Mr. Sên, many sage folk said. But they misjudged him there. It _was_ Sên’s doing, not his English wife’s; but it was a selfishness—almost his sole one. He did not wish too many material reminders about him of the homeland he had forsaken. England was his home now, and he did not intend ever again to be homesick for China, and he cut the risks of it as close as he could. But he still read his own classics, when he sat alone in his den, and the love-songs of Li-Po. A man cannot forgo the books that were the mother’s milk of his soul. And Sên King-lo still brushed many a letter to friends in Chinese—not all of them business letters. And he still sometimes played a game of chess with an opponent in Shansi, and he often heard the Yellow Sorrow surge and creak—in his dreams as he slept. But most of his nights were untroubled and dreamless, and whatever his sleep, he woke each day to a deeper and more tender love of the girl who lay beside him. King-lo always woke the earlier. For centuries his people had waked at dawn, and the old race-habit stayed.