Before he read it he saw how much he liked this girl’s writing. No other people take handwriting so seriously as the Chinese do—put so much into it, read so much from it. This was round, clear writing, individual and decided; nothing Spencerian about it—as refreshing as a cup of cold well-water on a very hot day—in a country where almost all handwritings were disconcertingly, monotonously alike. It was an attractive handwriting, and he thought it looked like its writer. It pleased him. But it was something else that brought a soft flush to his face, a new look in his eyes. She had signed it in full: “Sincerely, “Ivy Ruby Gilbert.” “Ivy _Ruby_! How strange!” he said under his breath. And he stood for a time at the window looking out at the opposite house, and not seeing it. Seeing a homestead in China where the hollyhocks and persimmons that crowded about it were almost as gay as the roof of his birthplace, where the flamingoes filched coolness from the tiny streamlet where the trout were pinkest and sweetest—perhaps because of the tang of the citron and lemon trees that hung over it, and the musk and mint and verbena that clothed its banks, and the violets his mother had loved best of all flowers grew in their delicate millions—his girl-mother whom he had never seen, his mother, at whose grave his father had worshiped until he’d gone to her “on high,” his mother who had died that his life might come: a service of motherhood that gives a saintship of its own in China, where mothers not so set apart are loved by sons as mothers are nowhere else—a service that lays on a Chinese son a double duty and joy—and, too, sorrow—of worship and remembrance. His mother had been fifteen at his birth and her death. And her “milk-name,” the name her husband always had called her, and called her in his sleep till he went to her, was “Ruby.” CHAPTER VIII Ivy Gilbert had a far happier lot than a nursery governess can count on. But even so she was not quite as happy as it’s good for a girl to be, and not nearly as happy as she’d have wished to be. There were two things she greatly craved: personal happiness and travel—travel actual and social, to go far off the beaten paths, to see new, out-of-the-way places, to have new, uncommon experiences. She longed for both all the more and the more persistently because she thought there was very little chance that either ever would come to her. She was actively unhappy, when she was, because she had so little to spend on clothes—it sounds raw and rough put so, but it is put truly—because she had fewer “good times” than most of the girls she knew, and (perhaps most of all) because she loathed the, in itself easy, work she had to do. No work is easy that we both dislike and must do. Ivy Gilbert was a very inefficient and a very discontented nursery governess.