Goto, salaaming deeply in the doorway, was sonorously announcing honourable dinner for the honourable sirs, and coming softly across the hall, in her simple plum coloured kimona with its golden obi, the paint washed from her face, and showing it fresh and clean as a baby's, Sunny's April smile was warming and cheering them all again.
Jinx voiced the sentiment of them all, including the angry professor and beauty loving Jerry:
"Gosh! give me Sunny just as she is, without one plea."
There comes a time in the lives of all young men sojourning in foreign lands when the powers that be across the water summon them to return to the land of their birth.
Years before, letters and cablegrams not unsimilar to those that now poured in upon her friends came persistently across the water to the father of Sunny. Then there was no Professor Barrowes to govern and lay down the law to the infatuated man. He was able to put off the departure for several years, but with the passage of time the letters that admonished and threatened not only ceased to come, but the necessary remittances stopped also. Sunny's father found himself in the novel position of being what he termed "broke" in a strange land.
As in the case of Jerry Hammond, whose people were all in trade, there was a strange vein of sentiment in the father of Sunny. To his people indeed, he appeared to be one of those freaks of nature that sometimes appear in the best regulated families, and deviate from the proper paths followed by his forbears. He had acquired a sentiment not merely for the land, but for the woman he had taken as his wife; above all, he was devoted to his little girl. It is hard to judge of the man from his subsequent conduct upon his return to America. His marriage to the mother of Sunny had been more or less of a mercenary transaction. She had been sold to the American by a stepfather anxious to rid himself of a child who showed the clear evidence of her white father, and greedy to avail himself of the terms offered by the American. It was, in fact, a gay union into which the rich, fast young man thoughtlessly entered, with a cynical disregard of anything but his own desires. The result was to breed in him at the outset a feeling that he would not have analysed as contempt, but was at all events scepticism for the seeming love of his wife for him.