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 Miss Wu to be interested in your business disappointments." She turned then to the girl. "It will be a pleasant surprise for you; you did not know your father had returned?"

Nang shook her head a little. "No. It is strange, for he is never unkind to me."

"Oh! I know what brought him back," Gregory persisted bellicosely, "and it's a dog-in-a-manger business, and I wrote and told him so, because the dock site isn't any earthly good to him."

Florence Gregory sighed. "Robert," she said severely, "I am sure Mr. Wu does not trouble his daughter with his business worries."

"My dear," her husband snapped irritably, "it is not his worries we are discussing, but mine. By the way, Miss Wu, has your right honorable father by any chance a brother?"

"Alas!" the girl replied sorrowfully—she had missed the slur in that "right honorable" (no one else had missed it, not even Low)—"alas! His honorable mother was unfortunate in only having one son."

"Well," almost grunted the Englishman, "I could have sworn she'd had twins."

"Robert!"—his wife's voice was coldly angry. But Hilda giggled.

"Twins!" Carruthers said, a little fatuously. He was puzzled, and he liked to understand things as he went along.

Gregory answered his wife's expostulation with expostulation. "My dear, it's scarcely two hours ago since Holman saw him in Hong Kong. And yet, as soon as we get this side of the water, your gardener, Miss Wu, tells me that your father has just arrived here in Kowloon, and that he was here for a while yesterday, and yet