“Undoubtedly,” Sên smiled as he said it, “if a eunuch sees her, or her baby cries before she gets back, and they hear and miss her. She’ll get a furious wigging—but not much more for this ‘first offense.’ She’ll not be beaten, have her stickpins taken away until the new moon, or get less soy with her evening rice, perhaps. She’ll not be lowered to the grade of the handmaidens. Po-Fang is very fond of La-yuên, and so is his Number-one. But I dare say she’ll worm back in as snugly as she wormed out. It’s a ‘capital offense,’ but I dare say she knows her wicked ropes—many of the concubines do—though I have heard the grandmother say that this girl was the most obedient of all the flowery quarter. It will be all right if her baby does not cry.” “No—it is his nap-time now,” Ruby said more contentedly. “He is not apt to wake, and if he should, he’s got a stick of barley-sugar in his hand.” “Sweet dreams!” Lo laughed. “You needn’t fret, dear. It will be all right, then, if the frog has got his suck-stick.” “But if a eunuch does see her going back and your grandmother is told?” “She will only shrug her shoulders, I think—today—and send the fellow about some other business; but she’ll not hear it, I am sure. It would be reported first to Po-Fang or to his Number-one. She has the right to hear it first, and she would only laugh and say she herself had sent the girl on an errand, and Sên Po-Fang would only wink at the eunuch and toss him a coin. Don’t you worry,” King-lo repeated as he motioned the bearers to move on. It was very wrong of the lord Sên King-lo to be footing it across China while his woman rode in a padded, cushioned palanquin. But he had come much of the way so, he had entered and left the homestead of his people, on foot, with his hand on his English wife’s chair, and he was going as he’d come. At dusk-fall they halted, and while their servants made their camp King-lo and Ruby feasted on the grass. “Now,” she said, as she gave him her empty coffee cup, and nodded to him for a cigarette, “open the parcels La-yuên gave me. I want to see.” “No.” Sên shook his head, as he struck her match. “You must not look at your last parting gift, given you after you had left the protection of the devil-screen. It will bring you bad luck for eleven moons, if you so much as peep, until your journey is over, until you are safe behind your own devil-screen of your own house door.” “A devil-screen, in Kensington!” she tossed at him scornfully. “We haven’t got a devil-screen at our front door.” “Oh—yes, we have.” “What?” Ruby demanded. “Love,” her husband told her. “Yes,” she answered softly, “and we’ll trust it, outside as well as in. Cut those strings at once.”