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 not like Basil, but like the daughter. Of the three she liked the honorable mother best—much. "You are just in time to take tea, if you will honor me," she said.

"May I present Mr. Carruthers to you, Miss Wu?" Mrs. Gregory asked.

Nang Ping greeted the additional guest with the widest outpush of her joined hands and the most stiffly formal bow she had made yet. But she liked this face; he looked, she thought, indeed an "honorable man."

"Tea! By all means," Mr. Gregory said briskly, steering for the richly laden toy tea-table in a business-*like way. He thought there'd been bowing and arm-shaking enough for a month o' Sundays.

Low Soong giggled a little when Tom Carruthers lifted his hat to her—Nang shot her cousin a severe look—and then, to Mr. Gregory's disgust, all the bowing and arm-waving was to do again.

"I am sorry not to serve tea in the English way," Nang Ping said, as she returned to her seat. (Gregory had already taken his.)

"Why!" Mrs. Gregory protested, "what can be more delightful than to serve China tea in the Chinese way in China? And this is such a real treat to me! I can have my tea in our stupid home way—half cold and quite insipid—any day."

"Well," Gregory commented, leaning back negligently in his chair and stretching out his legs in comfortable abandon, "perhaps I've not been here long enough to appreciate Chinese customs. That's the worst of being a real Englishman, Miss Wu—one misses English comforts."

Tom Carruthers saw a tiny shadow of disgust cloud across Nang Ping's painted mouth, and he knew, with