wayside tea-house, but the bungalow of a man he had treated none too well, and to call upon whom this was an odd hour.
In our moments of greatest personal dilemma and peril we seek the strangest confidants: sometimes in half-crazed desperation, sometimes in shame and fear of our nearer and dearer, sometimes instinctively, and then oddly often it proves well done. But whatever the most general explanation, most of us are prone at such tremulous times to lean upon some one not of our constant or closest entourage.
Basil Gregory had little estimate of Wu's position and power, and none at all of Chinese character. But he had heard something of Wu, of course, and had read unconsciously something of her father between the pretty lines of Nang Ping's gilded home life, and the young fellow realized that he was in personal peril, though he had not the least impression of how much.
He knew that he needed advice and a sounder judgment than his own.
His mother was his chum, and had been from his birth—they had stood together and pulled together always; but he could not take this to his mother. And he hoped to goodness it need not reach his father's ear. He feared his father's anger far less than he did his mother's sorrow, and he divined that the paternal anger would be nine-tenths financial and not more than one-tenth moral. But such an escapade as his was calculated to injure a business that depended considerably upon a nice balance of British interests and Chinese industriousness and acquiescence. And the elder Gregory could be nasty at times, and disconcertingly close-fisted too. Certainly he could turn to neither parent now. He was not brave, but he certainly would have thrown himself
