When King-lo woke he scarcely stirred lest he disturb her. Sometimes he drew a book from his bedside table and kept himself quiet with the volume’s pages till she moved and he turned to greet her waking. But oftener Sên King-lo lifted his chin on an elbow-supported hand and watched and worshiped the girlish loveliness of the delicate face asleep on its pillow. He thought of the girl on whose face he had laid his face as they stood by an old fallen apple-tree, the girl he had taken to wife one early morning in a crumbling, dreary church, on an old-fashioned street—a church that had not been any god-place of his churchless people—in the crown-city of an alien people, the Queen City of the Potomac. Though he’d loved the girl well, and had dared to risk for her the convictions of his being and the future of all his years, in defiance of the instincts of centuries and the laws of his fathers, she had not been loved as he loved his wife resting beside him, sleeping safe and secure in his love and in the keeping of his manhood. Day after day Sên King-lo’s soul kept a sacred tryst with the woman who slept happily there while the sun came back from China, going its way to China, rose over New York City, throwing splashes of gold over skyscrapers, Central Park, boat-busy river, “Flat Iron” and ocean. They had had many a golden jaunt together—a month in Venice, wonderful weeks in Spain, again and again a week in Paris—these married lovers and best of friends, before Ruben had come to call a halt to their journeying and make their London life more of a permanency than it had been. They had learned North Wales together and watched Windermere. No reasonable wife could have seriously asked more of marriage and husband than Sên King-lo had given her. And riant Mrs. Sên was a very reasonable and entirely contented woman. CHAPTER XXXIV It had worked so well that, when the Snows had come home a year ago, even Sir Charles had wondered if Sên King-lo might not prove to have been wiser than he—if only they stayed in England. He wondered often now what Sên thought of so English-looking a son, what he planned for Ruben’s future; but he himself—Sir Charles—saw some simplification of a vexatious problem, a sore racial complex, in the baby boy’s Anglo-Saxon fairness and features. There was little that Charles Snow would not have given or done to have prevented the Sên marriage, and he still winced at it—English prejudice and preconceptions are sturdy moral weeds—but as soon as it was sealed he wished it only well, bent his strength to its support, and did all he knew to regain the old footing between his cousin and himself. He wrote to Ivy the day after her marriage as unforced a letter as he could, and he wrote several longer, easier letters after she had reached Europe. But she answered none of them, and she made no response to any message he sent in Emma’s friendly and cousinly letters.