ES ADORN THE FIELDS
AND HIGHWAYS EVERYWHERE IN JAPAN, KOREA, AND CHINA. THIS IS ONE OF THEM.
A SHRINE AND A TEMPLE.]

[Illustration: A SUNRISE SILHOUETTE PHOTOGRAPH OF SOME OF THE HUNDREDS
OF BELLS OF BUDDHA ON BOROBOEDOER, JAVA.]

She was a beautiful girl and could play a piano as few American women I
have met. She would have graced any social room in America with her dark
beauty, her brown eyes, and her Oriental fire. She was rich. Her father
was worth several millions; being one of many shrewd Chinese business
men. She was dressed like a Parisian model, in the latest European
styles. She was in China for the first time in her life. Her father had
brought her back to marry a Chinese boy. She did not love him. She did
love my American friend.

"Why will you not marry James?" I asked her.

"My father would kill me," she said quietly.

"Does he say so?"

"He does. He went to America a week ago; and the last thing he said was,
'If you marry anything but a Chinese I will kill you!'"

"Did he really mean it?" I asked her, astonished.

"He meant it more than anything he ever meant in his life. It would be
considered a disgrace to my entire family if I married anybody but a
Chinese boy."

"Even though your father married a Scotch woman?" I said.

"For that very reason it is imperative that I marry my own blood," she
said.

"That is terrible!" I replied catching my first glimpse of the strange
and terrible social position in which a girl of mixed blood is placed in
China.

"You see," she said in a quiet, refined voice, with a marked English
accent, "I have an English education but I have Chinese blood. I can
never be happy marrying a Chinese after I have been educated in
England. I can never be happy with Chinese clothes, Chinese customs, and
Chinese people. And yet if I marry the man I love, it will break my
father's heart. He would kill me to be sure; for if he says he will,
that means that he will keep his word. But that would not be the worst
of it. To die would be easy."

"What would be the worst of it?" I asked, my heart stirred with a
strangely deep sympathy at this beautiful Chinese girl's dilemma.

"The worst thing would be that it would break my father's heart!"

Then she wept.

That was my first glimpse of the life of tragedy through which a
half-breed woman of the Orient has to go.

I met them in the Philippines, with Spanish and American blood running
in their veins; I met Malay girls whose