"Ah well, bad as he is, Mike's British same's I am, and he do hate a foreigner!" said Mrs. Barbara appreciatively.
Time went on and Jinty began to shoot up; she was growing quite tall, and Ah Lon also grew apace. But, still, though the little foreigner could now find her way about in the language of her new country, she shut her heart against kind little Jinty's advances.
"She won't have anything to say to me!" complained Jinty, "she won't make friends, Mrs. Barbara! The only thing she will look at is my pearl locket, she likes that!"
Indeed Ah Lon seemed never tired of gazing at the pearl-rimmed locket which hung by a slender little chain round Jinty's neck, and contained the miniature of her pretty young mother so long dead. The little Chinese never tired of stroking the sweet face looking out from the rim of pearls.
"Do you say prayers to it?" she asked, in her stammering English.
"Prayers, no!" Jinty was shocked. "I only pray to our Father and to the good Jesus. Why, you wouldn't pray to a picture?"
Ah Lon was silent. So perhaps she had been praying to the sweet painted face already, who could say?
It was soon after this talk that the two little girls sat in the study one morning. Ah Lon was at the table by the side of the professor, an open atlas between them and the old gentleman in his element.
Ah Lon, watching out of her slits of eyes, had never seen Jinty so dull and silent. And all that summer day it was the same.
"What's amiss with my dear maid?" anxiously asked Mrs. Barbara, when bed-time came.
"I've lost my pearl-rimmed locket!" sobbed Jinty. "Ah Lon asked to look at it this morning the first thing; she always does, you know. And I took it off, and then Mike pecked my legs and Ah Lon's so hard that we both ran away screaming, and I must have dropped the locket--and it's gone!"
"Gone! That can't be! Unless--unless----" Mrs. Barbara hesitated, and Jinty knew they were thinking the same thing. "Have you told Ah Lon, deary?"
"I did this afternoon, and she cried. I never saw her cry before!"
"Ah, jes' so! You can't trust they foreigners. But I'll sift this business, I shall!" vigorously said Mrs. Barbara.
But for days the disappearance of the locket was a mystery. In Mrs. Barbara's mind there was no doubt that Ah Lon had taken the coveted picture and concealed it in safe hiding. Jinty almost thought so too, and a gloom crept over Old Studley. "I dursn't tell the master, he's that wrapped up in the wicked little yellow-faced creature. I'll step over to the parson and tell he," Mrs. Barbara decided, and arraying herself in her Sunday best, she sallied forth to the vicarage.