"Yes, I've played them," he admitted cautiously. "But do you never see any white people except your uncle and aunt?"
"Why, no," she said. "Two summers ago, after the cholera, we visited Dr. Ferguson at Chang-Wing--that is over there. He is a medical missionary, but I did not like him because he asked me to marry him. He was sixty years old. Do you think it was right?"
"Right!" cried the boy. "It was a wicked sin."
"Well, he is the only white man I have met except you," said the girl. "Of course, I can remember a little playing with boys and girls a long, long time ago. Where is your ship?"
"That little white one down there. Can you see?" said the boy, pointing.
"Oh, is that it?" she asked. "Where are its sails?"
"There aren't any," he answered; "it goes by steam."
"I have read the 'Voyage of the Sunbeam,'" she said, "it is a beautiful book. It came out last year in a box. I have nearly twenty books in all."
The boy bit his lips. He was getting angry--angry that an American girl should have been imprisoned in such a hole all her young life--such a girl, too! What right had an elderly man and woman, even though they enjoyed the privilege of consanguinity, to exile a beautiful child from her native country and bring her up for the glory of God in a stewing, stinking, cholera-infested, famine-ridden Chinese village?
"It is strange to find you here," he said finally. "I expected only some freckle-faced, jimmy-jawed, psalm-singing woman, who would tumble all over herself to get away."
She looked at him puzzled for a moment and then burst into a ripple of laughter.
"What funny things you say!" she cried. "I suppose it is strange to find me here, but why should I have freckles or a--what did you call it--a jimmy-jaw? I do sing psalms. But my being here is no stranger than that you should be here. I have often wished some young man would come. You are the first I have known. I am tired of only women."
For a moment he was almost shocked at the open implication, but her frank eyes and matter-of-fact tone told him that the girl could not flirt. It was out of her sphere of existence.
"Would you like to get married?" he hazarded.
She looked a little puzzled for a moment.
"Of course, I should not like to leave Om and Su, and I wouldn't leave uncle and aunt, but sometimes--sometimes I have wondered if one couldn't serve God in a pleasanter place and do just as much good."