Slowly, very slowly Sên Ya Tin rose from her seat, came from the daïs, spurning the high footstool from her way, tottered across the glass-like mahogany floor on her tiny, tuber-like, satin-shod feet. Still Sên King-lo did not move. Her face broke up a little. His eyes leapt to her then. A cry that was only a whisper of sound breathed from her lips that scarcely moved. Sên King-lo took a step—another—two more, and she hid her working face on his coat. Her grandson’s arms were about her. They held her close, his head bent low to hers. Her hands fondled his sleeves. She was quivering now. He heard her heart beat under all its harness of silk and satin, embroidery and jewels, and she heard his. She was sobbing now. Yam-Sin, the monkey, pounced on the porcelain saucer and gorged himself on melon seeds that snapped briskly between his strong, tiny teeth, his silver chain clank-clanking against the high chair’s inlaid wood; the tiny pipe of an august lady clattered to the floor; and the fine, silken tobacco streamed after it, raining down from an upset lacquer box. CHAPTER XLVI The Chinese doyenne and autocrat of the Sêns and the young English wife of the house met two days later. If the meeting was not awkward, it was badly circumscribed. Ya Tin knew not a word of the other’s tongue, and Sên Ruby scarcely a score of Ya Tin’s. Their meeting was only decently ceremonial, and Madame Sên had made no elaborate and hampering toilet today. She was a sensible old creature and did the little she could to give the younger and so foreign woman a friendly and unembarrassing welcome. Since she had consented to receive Sên Ruby at all and in doing so acknowledge and condone a marriage she strongly deplored—and she had consented in reply to a letter King-lo had sent her from London, her answer reaching them in Hongkong—she, having consented, intended to show Sên Ruby all not too inappropriate kindnesses. But the language barrier was insurmountable. Sên King-lo acted as interpreter, but conversation so spoken cools in the process and grows increasingly difficult. And Sên Ya Tin was by nature and habit unbending and had no knack of assuming an easy congeniality that she never had felt. She had few affections; the few that she had were veritable passions. But between them and icy indifference and vitriolic hate Sên Ya Tin was almost devoid of creature feeling. She was critical and self-indulgent to a degree. She was brutally, and sometimes coarsely, frank. But she had high principles, and she never relaxed in her personal adherence to them—no matter what the cost to her own inclination and convenience. It was largely from this grandmother that Sên King-lo had inherited the uprightness of character and relentless habit of self-analysis that underlay and dominated all his suavity and sunny good nature. He had inherited also from her no little of his manliness, but he had inherited from Ya Tin few of his tastes. Indeed,