A spinning-wheel hummed in a near mat-hut. Two graybeards were playing backgammon under a mulberry-tree. Children were at play on a far hillslope, for kites rose from it like a school of excited (if not scandalously tipsy) butterflies. Dozens of tiny dogs scampered and yapped on a mignonette field, and others slept in the sun. A cat was chained to a sundial. And roses clotted everywhere; more roses and more kinds of roses than ever grew in Virginia. All the homestead place bristled and sang with human life; anvils rang, chisels scratched, saws rasped, grain ran like noisy sand in the man-made chutes and conduits; frail, busy smoke curled slowly up from dozens of twisted chimneys; an employed, thriving, bustling world, the home-hold of the Sêns. Beyond its low, stonewalled boundaries all was wild and silent—a great active hive of human affluence, set in an untouched wilderness of Nature’s holding. Sên King-lo caught his breath, and his eyes filled with tears. Ruby Sên’s eyes did not kindle. She smiled a little—and involuntarily a word came in her alien thought: “Caravanserai.” A servant came running, others ran at his heels. The high doorlike gate was unchained, unbarred, and opened, and the guard-devils—or perhaps they were gods—painted on it drew apart and aside, as if making obsequious way for the Sên who had come home. And Sên King-lo with his hand on his wife’s litter walked slowly on to the house in which another Sên Ruby had borne him and died. Sên King-lo’s soul flamed; but he leaned down to his wife as they went—between prostrate retainers now—and spoke to her with as light unconcern as he might have done at the Eastbourne or Windermere end of a long day’s journey. CHAPTER XLIV Mrs. Sên knew before they left Hongkong (for Sên King-lo had told her, explaining it all as well as he could) that she would find odd customs, some, at least, of them unwelcome and irksome, to which she’d have to conform at the home of Sên Ya Tin. In Hongkong she had accepted and assented cheerfully, gaily even—thinking them all part of the fun and, too, sincerely holding them part of the nothing-price to pay for the pleasure of going with him and for the great adventure of making a long Chinese journey in a Chinese way, of seeing his childhood home and sharing it with him, and feeling radiantly and deeply sure that any personal, discomfort, embarrassment even, of hers would be a joyful contribution to make to his happiness. But she found it hard to feel so now, even at first; and as the days passed and the newness a little lost color, and the dullness and out-of-placeness deepened, she found people in fantastic clothes with grotesque manners and it impossible. They gave her great greeting—these funny Chinese ways, who thronged the old homestead—and they gave her ceremonial and elaborate attendance and entertainment that also was heartily kind. But it all both bothered and bored her, and it repelled her.