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 hand. Nang Ping moved too, a little towards her guest, and made the elaborate gesture, hands clasped, of Eastern greeting. Mrs. Gregory still held out her hand, and wondered, when she gained the girl's, which was the softer or the better kept, Nang's or her own. Basil had wondered it often.

"This visit to your beautiful garden is the greatest treat I've had since I arrived in China, Miss Wu," she began.

Wu Nang Ping bowed. "I am pleased to receive you in my honorable father's absence. He has had much kindness in England. It is his command that always English friends have most honorable welcome here, and it gives me happiness. My cousin, Low Soong."

"How do you do?" Mrs. Gregory said cordially. "And this is my daughter." The three girls bowed, the two Chinese with grave formality, a gesture of the arms more than a bending.

"Such a perfectly beautiful place!" Mrs Gregory said it sincerely, her beauty-loving eyes here, there and everywhere gloating.

"This is my own garden, where I walk with my women," Nang Ping told her.

"It beats our poor little garden, Hilda," the mother said gayly.

"Into fits." Just a trifle of the surface vulgarity which, with its hard coating of adamant varnish, covered and hid Robert Gregory's soul side—even from his wife—and wronged him, had caught and scorched, slightly, the delicacy of Hilda's breeding. Even Florence Gregory, some rare times, used a slight word of slang: "As the husband is, the wife is."

Low Soong listened to Hilda with polite indifference. Low Soong had no English. But Nang Ping wondered