But even as they newly journeyed his soul had quickened and throbbed to his country. All that Europe had wrapped about him as an intimate garment fell from him as ash falls from a cigar. He was Chinese again, only Chinese, wholly Chinese, and _at home_. Westminster, Oxford, New York and Virginia were farther from him and more alien than Mars and Orion. Men he had known and liked, broken bread and thought with, in London and Washington were as gone from him, as nothing, as children’s names that the inexorable pulse of the great tide has washed and ironed from the seashore sands. The West was scarcely a dream, less than a wraith or a sun-sucked mist that’s forgotten in the yellow throb of an August day. Of all the West, only one thing stayed with him now: the woman he loved and their child—that, too, was exquisitely, sacredly she—part of her body as of his, part of his soul as of hers—the physical and spiritual fruit of the spiritual and physical love of man and woman who were one—the tangible signature of life’s greatest impulse. He thought of Ruby, leaning beside him here, contented and confident, as of some white human rose he had gathered and grafted into his being and keeping here in the dear homeland that was hers as much as his, hers, because his, and, because his, even more hers than his own: his by inalienable birthright, hers by a greater title-deed; more sacramented hers—doubly, trebly hers, because it had given her Chinese wifehood and Chinese motherhood, the supreme, imperial motherhood to which all other earthly motherhoods are small and weak. And he thought of his child as of a bud that the sun of a Chinese love had warmed into Chinese life. Every tiniest flower that grew by the wayside—commonest flowers of Kent and Virginia many of them—every bird that swung and fluted on a tree that shaded their path, welcomed him home; and his soul denied, his senses disavowed, that close-kindred flowers, birds so feathered and throated, grew in any alien mileage of Earth. The waterfalls that surged and flung, the tiny brooks that tinkled over the pebbles and romped with the baby trout that played in their happy iridescent bosoms, were _real_, real water, real beauty, real message, only because they were Chinese—Chinese cascade, Chinese brook, Chinese water. There were _no_ others. All places beyond China were one dun, lifeless No Man’s Land between Earth and Heaven, between Time and Eternity, as bleak, fruitless, unbellied as a far gray stretch of flat polar ice, as barren and lifeless and hopeless as the Turanian desert at night. There was _nothing_ but China, lovely, laughing, forever imperial, his Mother! And Sên Ruby was the white rose of China, twined in his heart, soul of his soul, pulse of his day, dream and crown of his night, who had perfumed his manhood and borne him a son.