“It has worked perfectly,” he said after a time. “We have had no regret—neither of us. Ruby, I think, has not had an anxiety. I, when Ruben was coming, had my bad half-hours. A Chinese baby would have been a complication, even in London, the kindest, least censorious place on earth and the most sincerely cosmopolitan. You see a greater and a more obvious mingling—or, at least, mixture of races in many other places; Constantinople, Venice, San Francisco, and twenty others. But it is only in London—only in London of all the world—that there is genuine welcome for the strangers within the gates. But in London itself there would have been no place for a Chinese child _of ours_. And also, I wondered how the sight of a Chinese baby in her arms—at her breast—would affect Ruby. I have the type of Chinese face—that we Chinese have now and then—that does not bear country stamped on it too strongly. I might pass as any one of several races, two or three of them not Oriental or only remotely so, but it’s not a family trait. Every other Sên I ever saw and every other Pei-fu—my mother was a Pei-fu before her marriage—has been unmistakably, strikingly Chinese in appearance. And Ruby was used to me. She scarcely remembered, except in a hazy, detached way, that I was not English. But Nature plays many tricks, but will brook none played on her. The Mongolian is a persistent type; and such mixed marriages as ours, through some inscrutable law of Nature, seem almost sure to perpetuate, and even to emphasize, one racial type and to ignore the other.” “Yes,” the physician murmured. “I knew that our child might be born more Chinese than the Chinese—and I wondered if I might not see my wife shrink, even a little, from the child our love had given us. I was hideously anxious for her. And I dared not say one word, give one hint, to prepare her; help her, as that perhaps might have done, to resist an almost inevitable revulsion—to destroy it before it existed. But Nature spared us!” “This time,” the physician thought to herself. “When I saw how lily-fair our babe was——” “So you quite forgave him for looking so little like your own people? I wondered, if you had, if you _could_, when I saw his picture just now.” “I worshiped him for what he had spared his mother,” Sên King-lo said simply. “He certainly looks a changeling, even for a child of Ivy’s,” Elenore Ray said musingly. “Atavism is intensely interesting—and very baffling.” She added, “What is it that is troubling you, nagging you, then!—if I may know?” “You have used the one right word, Dr. Ray, ‘nagging.’ When the messages—there were two—came that called me to China, I tried to come alone; but my wife would not let me.” “No, of course,” the woman said regretfully. “Must you be here long—in China?”