Ruby had not noticed that her husband had avoided going out with her in Hongkong and was avoiding it more and more; but it was so. He was imperatively busy now, crowding into days the work of business drive and finesse that might well have over-crowded weeks, if not months, for a less capable man. He could not well take his wife to _hong_ and to counting-house, to long bank conferences that more often than not ran with a strong political under-current—the very life-blood of young China, if not of China itself—or to more secret and smaller conclaves which took place behind well-barred doors, when only two or three Chinese gathered to speak together in slow, hushed tones and anxious quiet words. But this was not the reason why Mr. and Mrs. Sên so rarely were seen together in Hongkong. The reason lay close and well-guarded in Sên King-lo’s breast: a tiny coiled serpent that lifted its narrow hooded head now and then, meeting Sên’s eyes with sly, cold, wicked eyes, and sometimes at night hissing softly in his ear. There were functions to which he might have taken her, long rambles which invited and beckoned, water-side strolls, leisurely peak-side climbs. And there was Happy Valley, the incessantly recurring Derby Day of all the Anglo-Chinese world and his wife, and there was Church Parade, as smart a function, if more narrowed, as London’s own, and far more picturesque. But Sên avoided and evaded them all whenever he could. Every hour that he could spend with Ruby at the bungalow he did, and he filled them all so full of intimate charm and gay comradeship that they fed her all the happiness and content that even she—greedy of both—could crave or assimilate. And sometimes she chid herself sharply that she could be so happy so far from Ruben. But Sên King-lo had no doubt of her motherliness for he saw the look in her eyes as they turned to the harbor on “home mail” day. Sên King-lo was doing his utmost, and his English wife did not suspect—not yet, at least—the cancerous price that a Chinese soul already was paying for a bunch of red peppers an English girl had tucked in a jade-green dress once in Virginia.