It was evening when they returned—Wou Sankwei and his boy. The little fellow ran up to her in high glee. “See, mother,” said he, pulling off his cap, “I am like father now. I wear no queue.”

The mother looked down upon him—at the little round head from which the queue, which had been her pride, no longer dangled.

“Ah!” she cried. “I am ashamed of you; I am ashamed!”

The boy stared at her, hurt and disappointed.

“Never mind, son,” comforted his father. “It is all right.”

Pau Lin placed the bowls of seaweed and chickens’ liver before them and went back to the kitchen where her own meal was waiting. But she did not eat. She was saying within herself: “It is for the white woman he has done this; it is for the white woman!”

Later, as she laid the queue of her son within the trunk wherein lay that of his father, long since cast aside, she discovered a picture of Mrs. Dean, taken when the American woman had first become the teacher and benefactress of the youthful laundryman. She ran over with it to her husband. “Here,” said she; “it is a picture of one of your white friends.” Sankwei took it from her almost reverently, “That woman,” he explained, “has been to me as a mother.”

“And the young woman—the one with eyes the color of blue china—is she also as a mother?” inquired Pau Lin gently.

But for all her gentleness, Wou Sankwei flushed angrily.

“Never speak of her,” he cried. “Never speak of her!”

“Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Pau Lin. It was a soft and not unmelodious laugh, but to Wou Sankwei it sounded almost sacrilegious.

Nevertheless, he soon calmed down. Pau Lin was his wife, and to be kind to her was not only his duty but his nature. So when his little boy climbed into his lap and besought his father to pipe him a tune, he reached for his flute and called to Pau Lin to put aside work for that night. He would play her some Chinese music. And Pau Lin, whose heart and mind, undiverted by change, had been concentrated upon Wou Sankwei ever since the day she had become his wife, smothered, for the time being, the bitterness in her heart, and succumbed to the magic of her husband’s playing—a magic which transported her in thought to the old Chinese days, the old Chinese days whose impression and influence ever remain with the exiled sons and daughters of China.