Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/245

 expected to hear, Wu paused still and met the English eyes squarely. "We are both young." And after a pause, so throbbing that even the three automaton servants must have felt it beat, he added slowly, "Except that the two races don't mingle, I would"

"Marry her?" Wu interrupted haughtily.

"Yes," Gregory replied, as if proclaiming a determination and a promise. "Yes—if she still wishes it."

"A very interesting suggestion," Wu sneered. "In your country, when a woman has been dishonored, marriage is called 'making an honest woman of her.' It is a quaint notion. To me it seems a nasty one—plastering some putrid sore with gold-leaf! Here we have other methods. To us a woman's honor, once stained, no more can be clean again than the petals of a rose, torn and scattered by the storm, can be gathered back into their opening bud to perfume the dawn and glisten with its dew. If marriage, and with such as you, would redeem the honor of a ruined girl, what would redeem the honor of a father and a house so desecrated as mine? Nothing! And nothing is left me but to avenge. And I avenge it now." He turned and confronted the trembling wretch with a look before which a braver and a less guilt-stained man might well have quailed, and each word curled and hissed from his mouth like a snake.

Basil moistened his lips, tried to speak, but failed.

"However," Wu continued, "I was going to say that although your disappearance has become a matter of public advertisement, yet the last place where you are looked for happens to be your present, if temporary, abode. I say 'temporary' because in this life everything is temporary—even life itself. You might be buried here—though I don't say you will be—without any one being the wiser outside my own household. At one word