He paused on a wide white porch and William was compelled to stop, too, though his feet urged him to the door. Mr. Cameron’s sharp small blue eyes roamed over the sea and the sky and fixed themselves upon the horizon.
“No storm in sight,” he murmured.
He turned abruptly and led the way through the open door into a wide hall that swept through the house to open again at the back upon gardens of blooming flowers.
“I don’t know where anybody is,” Mr. Cameron murmured again. He touched a bell and a uniformed manservant appeared and took his cap and coat, glanced at William and looked away.
“Where is Mrs. Cameron?”
“In the rose garden, sir.”
“Tell her I’m bringing someone to see her. Is Jeremy with her?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well.”
The man went silently toward the end of the hall and Mr. Cameron said to William, “It is always warm in the gardens. Come along.”
He strolled toward the door and William followed him. His eyes stole right and left, and he saw glimpses of great cool rooms furnished in pale blue and rose. Silver gray curtains hung to the floor at the windows, and flowers were massed in bowls. Here were his dreams. He lifted his head and smiled. If such dreams could be real he would have them, someday, for his own.
The smell of hot sunshine upon fragrant flowers scented the air of the gardens as they reached the open doors. He knew very well from the garden about the mission house in Peking that only workmen could bring about the high perfection of what he now saw. Formal flower beds as precise as floral carpets stretched about him. A path of clean red brick led to an arbor a quarter of a mile away, and the arbor itself stood in a mass of late blooming roses. The manservant emerged from the arbor and stood respectfully while Mr. Cameron approached.
“Mrs. Cameron is here, sir. I am to bring tea in half an hour, sir, if you wish.”
“Oh, all right,” Mr. Cameron replied carelessly.
They entered the vine-hung arbor, and William saw a slender pretty woman, whose hair was graying, and a boy of his own age. She was sitting by a table filling a wicker basket with roses. The boy was stretched on a couch, a book turned face down on his lap. He was tall, with light hair and pale skin and pale blue eyes.
“This is William Lane, my dear,” Mr. Cameron said. “I found him lying on his stomach on top of the bluff, and he says he comes from, China.”
“Do you really?” Mrs. Cameron exclaimed. “How interesting!” She lifted large sweet brown eyes to William’s face.
“I do, Mrs. Cameron,” William replied. “I’m glad if it interests you.”
“This is Jeremy,” Mr. Cameron said. The two boys touched hands.
Mr. Cameron sat down. “I have a daughter somewhere, too. Where is she, my dear?”
“Candace?” Mrs. Cameron was busy again with roses. “She went to the village to buy something or other. I begged her to wait and get it in town, but you know how she is.”
Mr. Cameron did not answer this. He looked at his son. “Well, Jeremy, William is going to Harvard, too. Coincidence, eh? You’ll have to get acquainted.”
Jeremy smiled. His mouth, cut deep at the corners, was sweet and rather weak. “I’d like to — but imagine China! Did you find it exciting? Do sit down. I’d get up, only I’m not supposed to.”
William sat down. “It didn’t seem exciting because I’ve always lived there.”
“Does it seem strange to you in America?”
“Not here,” William said.
“The Chinese love flowers, I suppose,” Mrs. Cameron said. William considered. “I didn’t see very much of the Chinese, really. I grew up in a compound, and my mother was always afraid I’d catch something. But we did have chrysanthemums, and I remember the bowls of lilies our gardener used to bring before Chinese New Year.”
He felt he was not doing very well and his anxious instinct urged him to frankness. “I suppose I should know a great deal about the Chinese, but one doesn’t think much when one is growing up. The common people are rather filthy, I’m afraid, and the others are fed up with Westerners just now and didn’t want to mix with us. There was even real danger if they did — the old Empress didn’t favor it.”
“A wicked old woman, from all I hear,” Mr. Cameron said suddenly. “Trying to stop normal trade!”
“I do hope your parents are safe,” Mrs. Cameron sighed. “What we’ve read in the newspapers has been dreadful. So shocking! As if what we were doing wasn’t for their good!”
He was diverted from answer by hearing a clear young voice. “Oh, here you all are!”
A very pretty yellow-haired girl was coming toward them. She was all in white and she had a tennis racket with low-heeled white shoes tied to it. At the viny entrance she paused, the sunshine catching in her hair and making a nimbus about her pleasant rosy face. She looked like Jeremy and she had the same sweet mouth but the lips were full and red.
“Hello,” she said in a soft voice.
Jeremy said, “Come in. This is William Lane. William, this is my sister Candy.”
She nodded. “Do you play tennis?”
“I do, but I haven’t my things.”
“Come along, we have plenty.”
“Candace dear — perhaps he doesn’t want to—” Mrs. Cameron began.
“I’d like to, very much,” William said.
He rose. Tennis he played very well indeed. He had chosen it instead of cricket and his only chance for pleasurable revenge had been when a cricketer opposed him upon the immaculate coolie-kept courts at Chefoo.
“Come back again,” Jeremy said, his smile wistful.
“Do come back,” Mrs. Cameron said warmly.
Mr. Cameron was silent. Leaning against the back of the cushioned wicker chair, he had closed his eyes and fallen asleep.
Beside the girl William held himself straight and kept silent. His instinct for dignity told him that she was used to much talk and deference. To his thinking American women were pampered and deferred to far too much. Even the maids at his grandfather’s house were sickening to him in their independence. In China an amah was not a woman — merely a servant.
“I hope you don’t mind cement courts,” Candace said, as she gave him tennis shoes and a racket from a closet in the great hall. “Ours are frightfully old-fashioned, but my father won’t change them. I like grass but of course grass isn’t too easy at the beach. Though my father could, if he would — only he won’t.”
“I shan’t mind,” William said.
“How old are you?” Candace inquired, staring at his handsome profile.
“Seventeen.”
“I’m sixteen.”
“Are you going to college?”
“No, of course not — Miss Darrow’s-on-the-Hudson, for a year, and then I’m to come out.”
He had the vaguest notions of what it meant for a girl to come out, but now that he knew he was a year older than she, he felt more at ease. “Shall you come out in New York?”
“Of course — where else?”
“I thought perhaps in London.”
“No, my father is frightfully American. I might be presented at the Court of St. James’s later. The man who was once my father’s partner is the American Ambassador there.”
“I knew a lot of English people in China.”
“Really?”
“I didn’t like them. Very conceited, as though they owned the country. Their merchant ships ply all the inner waters and their men-of-war, too. If it hadn’t been for us, they’d have made a colony out of the whole of China.”
“Really? But don’t they do that sort of thing very well?”
“They’ve no right to hog everything,” William said stiffly.
Candace mused upon this. “I suppose not, though I haven’t thought about such things. We’ve always been in England a lot — Mother and Jeremy and I. My father has no time.”