case, as such things go. The Chinese girl was nobody's daughter. Carruthers had never deceived her, and had promised her nothing that he had not given. But she had grown to care for him. O curse of womanhood!
And Hilda had a sturdy, wholesome instinct of virtue, a matter-of-course as towards herself, relentless towards others, that she had inherited from her mother, but not from her mother alone; and she also had a quick, curt, businesslike method of dealing with the facts and incidents of life that she had inherited solely from Robert Gregory. She considered her engagement to Tom Carruthers a bad debt; and she wrote it off with a steady hand. Basil was angry with her, and had upbraided her. "Girls don't understand such things!" he told her petulantly. "But I thought you had more sense."
"I understand myself," she had retorted haughtily.
Needless to say, Carruthers also was angry, and shared his anger with generous, masculine impartiality between Hilda Gregory and I Matt So. Mrs. Gregory was glad. And it was she who mentioned the news (but not its circumstance) in her next letter to Hong Kong. Hilda's father was indifferent. There was time enough for so rich a man's daughter, and the finest girl in England, by the Lord Harry, any day; and as for Tom, she might do worse, of course, but, on the other hand, she might do a long sight better.
It was not Basil's old misdemeanor that had so broken his mother, nor was it her experience in the K'o-tang of Wu Li Chang. It was the estrangement that had grown between her and her son—an estrangement that had become almost a bitterness. At times it was a bitterness.
A great secret shared between two, and inviolably kept by both, must be either a great bond or a great
