Sên King-lo forgot Europe, the playing-fields of Eton, the rush of hoofs at Goodwood, the books he had read at Bloomsbury and at the Bodleian, geranium-hung houseboats on the Thames, Big Ben’s luminous signal of time, the clasp of Englishmen’s hands. He only remembered the woman beside him because his manhood and loyalty could not swerve even a hair’s-breadth from what she had been to him, given him, trusted, consummated. But he moved beside her now, a Chinese man with his Chinese mate. Once or twice he had spoken to her in Chinese, and only the English lilt of her good-natured laughing at him had reminded him—jerked him back, even with the music of its ripple, to the valley of actuality with a bi-national quicksand under the tomato-red of the succulent, toothsome love-apples. Sên King-lo never thought in English now, and when he spoke to his wife as they journeyed on and on into China, and still on and on, he had to translate the word symbols of his thoughts before he spoke them. Translation is a thief. Always! If the Chinese who never have left the land of their birth, the centuried home of their race, love China as no other country is loved, the Chinese who have left her, lost her a little in exile, as exiles must, and have found her again, washing their homesick eyes in her beauty and joy, laving their souls in her soul, must love China even more. Comparison is the acid test. China stands it. And _so_ Sên King-lo loved China now. He did not love his woman less. But he loved his country the more. And now there was something he must say—the time had come—something the kindness of which he did not question, could not question, but the seeming-kindness of which he doubted. How would it seem to her? Even—how would she take it—she, he remembered it now with a sudden sickness, who even in honeymoon’s _sans souci_ and complacent time had desired and bought visiting cards engraved “Mrs. K. L. Senn?” He had meant to suggest it before they left Hongkong—but occasions had slipped, or been crowded out. And, too, in Hongkong, he had assumed that she took, as he did, its advisability and convenience for granted. But he realized now that Ruby had not. And in Hongkong he himself had not realized it as the necessity he saw it now. She had been scrupulously tended and served as they journeyed, but small danger signals had pricked his quick and subtle intelligence, as broken twigs and twisted vines or scattered grain, a feather caught on a thorn, a bead dropped by a cactus, are messages of warning to a Sioux. He had seen a look that was scarcely a look—more a veneered masking crust than a look—on coolie faces and the faces of pilgrims they’d met and passed—nothing much—and yet—he kept his pistol well loaded and lay at night across the curtain-door of her tent, and his thoughts busied his mind as the silk-wrapped shuttle busies the rapid loom.