“I know that,” the girl said quietly. CHAPTER XXIV The story of Reginald Hamilton’s last ride in Washington never got out. His horse found its way back to its stable, quite uninjured, and that, plus a check for a bill never before too promptly paid, satisfied the liveryman who owned it. Unlike Washington society, he was not curious. And neither Ivy nor Sên King-lo told any one—for some weeks not even Sir Charles. Had Hamilton stayed on in Washington, probably both his cousin and their friend would have felt that Snow must be told—that he, the only man in America who had a right to do it, might stand between the girl and any further advances of the Reginald. But a week after his descent to the snow-thick road, Reginald and his sister, together, though not on speaking terms, betook them to Chicago. Reginald Hamilton had been away from Washington for a few days when Emmeline had achieved her newspaper _coup_; and on his return, after the ill-fated paragraph’s contradiction, she had managed to prevent him from attempting a tardy intervention. But he had heard all about it, of course; and, though not quite dull enough to doubt that the invention had been Emmeline’s, with intention and hope behind it, it had humiliated as well as enraged him; and this, added to his thwarted and growing passion for Ivy, had swung him quite off his balance of mind and breeding, never very secure. And his outrageous and, because futile, absurd behavior had been, at least in part, a demented blow struck in his sister’s defense. He, craven though he was, would have slain Emmeline himself before he’d have seen her married to a Chinese; but he was infuriated that Chinese Sên King-lo had scorned the hint which, as Hamilton (and all Washington) knew, Emmeline more than once had given. By mid-January the rumors that had smirched Sên’s name had died away and made room for others about some one else. Washington society has too many sensations to dawdle long over one—and too many great interests to quite lose its head over things that are in truth as uninteresting as they are vicious and petty. Sên still rode and walked with Ivy, had long Anglo-Chinese conferences with Snow, still played with Dick and Blanche, sometimes carrying them off to have several hours of high-jinks in his own rooms. Sir Charles went there sometimes, and Emma Snow had had tea there with Sên King-lo twice and had lunched there once with Sên and Miss Julia: a very great and unmerited honor for Sên, Uncle Lysander thought. Kow Li had a different opinion which he kept to himself. Ivy had not been invited. Mary Withrow and Lucille Smith wondered why. Emma Snow and Dr. Ray, who still was in Washington, thought they knew, but, like Kow Li, each kept her opinion strictly to herself.