Ah Sing and perhaps half a dozen other servants moved about on padded, noiseless feet, preparing Miss Wu's tea-table with all its picturesque paraphernalia of elaborate teakwood stools and benches, lacquer sweetmeat-cabinets, glazed porcelain tea-bowls as thin as gauze and painted by master craftsmen, trays of candied fruit, and several delicacies of which Florence Gregory did not know the name and could not guess the nature.
"So," she said, surprised to find how comfortable a stone bench could be, "Mr. Wu was at Oxford. How interesting! I wonder when. I knew a Chinese gentleman—a student there—when I was quite a girl. We lived at Oxford, my father and I. I forget his name. I have the saddest memory, especially for names, and it could not have been your father whom I knew, for I distinctly remember hearing, the year after I was married—or some time about then—that my friend was dead, killed in a climbing accident somewhere on the Alps. He was a fine sportsman."
"Many Chinese gentlemen are sent to Oxford, I have heard my honorable father say," Nang Ping rejoined. "The Japanese go more to Cambridge."
"Yes—and yet," Mrs. Gregory said musingly, but more interested in watching the servants than she was in her talk with this rather wooden and very painted-faced child of the East, "your name—'Wu,' I mean—has seemed familiar to me from the first, and now I seem to remember that the man I knew at Oxford had a surname rather like that—or even that. How odd!"
"There are many Wus in China," the girl said. "It is a most large clan. All our clans are very large. We are, you know, so old."
