Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/195

 she went and stood very close behind her mistress; and when Mrs. Gregory moved her head restlessly, the Chinese woman slid her hand between it and the sharp edge of the chair's hard back.

And they might well be tired—the amah too, as well as the frailer, fairer woman. For they had indeed been beating the island and the mainland for days now—searching, searching, and often in quarters of whose existence the English woman could not have suspected, and whose nature she had but dimly grasped—some of them quarters into which no European woman, nice or otherwise, had penetrated before. But Mrs. Gregory had been in no peril. She had not suffered rudeness even. Ah Wong had guarded her well. Ah Wong had known how to do it.

But not one clew, not even the hint of a clew, had they found. Nor had John Bradley, who, in a different and quieter way, had been hunting as indefatigably—and was hunting now.

Robert Gregory sat crouched a little forward now, leaning on the desk, watching his wife miserably, but saying no more—tortured for her (almost forgetting his own pain in hers, or feeling his own only through hers), but pathetically glad to have her rest even this little.

Holman slipped over to the window and stood looking moodily out to the Chinese-and-Mongol-teeming dockside. Tom Carruthers sat quietly down on the big desk too and took Hilda's hand in his.

For several moments there was a silence in the room that was broken only by the ticking of the clock and the incessant echo of hubbub that buzzed in through the windows, the other five all conspiring eagerly to hold and guard Mrs. Gregory's rest undisturbed until she broke it herself. Even the Chinese clerk who had come