Achmed Abdullah

“ Anthony Campbell had died in giving birth to Marie, and there was a challenging silence whenever the girl mentioned her mother—father and daughter had lived in the uncomfortable relations existing between two intimately connected persons who realize that the atmosphere about them is surcharged with innumerable little explosive atoms.
“Darn it all!” her father exclaimed. “You’ve lost all your feminine sweetness and restraint. You talk like a man, behave like a man, smoke like a man, and”—he wound up accusingly, furiously, yet somehow triumphantly—“you make debts like a man! ”

“ Marie laughed. “Not a very sound believer in the Chinese republic, in lusty young Democracy, are you?” she asked.
“Are you?”
“What have I to do with China? I am an American.”
“Oh—yes”—the other gave a gliding smile—“I almost forgot.”
Marie smiled back. She liked the other better and better.
“Of course,” she said, “being a woman and an American, I am curious. ”

“ Yes—he had curtly told Jack Henderson and his other friends—he had married in China. And—yes—his wife had died in childbirth.
To-day the beginnings of his fortune seemed very far away; very far away, almost unreal, seemed the days when he had been a remittance-man.
But he was an honest man.
“Yes,” he said to his daughter; “once I was a remittance-man, and my father sent me a thousand dollars every three months.”
“Very well,” she went on coolly. “You promised me the same chance you had. Only—make it fifteen hundred a quarter instead of a thousand.” ”

“ He told me how irresponsible you had been for years after leaving college—how at last, in desperation, he asked you to leave Scotland for Scotland’s good. In fact, you came over to America as a remittance-man, didn’t you? ”

“ He had been too poor to buy dynamite. And so Jack Henderson, the Crow’s Nest Pass storekeeper, who was nearly as poor as himself, grub-staked him for all he could. He had worked with pick and shovel all that winter into the summer. ”

“ She did.
“Polo-mallets, one hundred and seventy-five dollars. English hunting-saddle, ninety-five. Yes?” She looked up questioningly.
“Go on. There!” He pointed at another detailed row of items.
“But,” she rejoined mildly, “you told me only the other day that I could buy myself a new outfit——”
“A woman’s! Not a man’s! Breeches! Cigarettes! Poker-chips!”
“What are you going to do about it, dad?”
“I’m going to give you your choice. Do you want to be a girl, and behave like one, or be treated like a man?” ”

“ It was also that, somehow, even in these few months, China had got beneath her skin in a strange way. For, in her non-thinking moments, there was always about her a curious impression that she belonged here. Yet—what was there for her to do?
Two weeks before, her quarterly check had come. She had spent every cent of it in the gorgeous silk and jade shops near the Gate of Eternal Purity. And here was Liu Po-Yat, the Manchu chambermaid, with a note from Monsieur Paul Pailloux, the hotel manager, asking Miss Campbell to settle her bill before ten o’clock the next morning, or——
“Or?” ”