Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/259

 "Ah!" Wu said, "that is a very precious treasure. Our Chinese potters, as probably you know, are very fond of reproducing members of the animal kingdom."

"I have never seen a finer piece of that kind of pottery in my life," Mrs. Gregory said with almost breathless enthusiasm, gazing at the curio with eyes that scarcely saw it and fumbling her rings.

Wu Li Chang smiled. "And it is a very sacred object," he said.

"Oh?" she asked.

"It is a mandarin duck," Wu told her significantly. "And the mandarin duck with us, you know, is the emblem of conjugal fidelity!" He ended with a strange, low, sinister laugh. It was slight and very low, but it affected Florence Gregory weirdly. To cover up her own disconcerted inquietude she moved—at random—to one of the magnificent carved cedar columns beside the altar (Wu watching her with a grinning face) and pointed to the weapon hanging there. "And that sword up there?"

"That?" Wu laughed, and at the sound Ah Wong's blood curdled in her breast; "yes, that's an interesting thing. It has rather a curious history."

Her procrastinated anxiety for her son, her thwarted hunger to see him, were unnerving her, and she was growing anxious on her own account, though that she scarcely realized and in no way could have explained.

"Oh?" she forced herself to say. But she said it lamely, and she could say no more.

Apparently Wu noticed nothing amiss. "Perhaps rather a gruesome one," he said with a note of apology.

"Oh!" his guest said with a shudder; "well, then, don't tell me! At the moment I don't quite feel"

"Then," Wu interrupted her quickly, solicitously