Presently her thoughts made her sigh
wearily. During the lifetime of her mother, who had died while
Lala was yet a little girl, life had been different and so much
brighter.
She imagined that in the mingled sounds of dock and river which
came to her she could hear the roar of surf upon a golden beach.
The stuffy air of Limehouse took on the hot fragrance of a tropic
island, and she sighed again, but this time rapturously, for in
spirit she was a child once more, lulled by the voice of the
great Pacific.
Young as she was, the death of her mother had been a blow from
which it had taken her several years to recover. Then had
commenced those long travels with her father, from port to port,
from ocean to ocean, sometimes settling awhile, but ever moving
onward, onward.
He had had her educated after a fashion, and his love for her she
did not doubt. But her mother's blood spoke more strongly than
that part of her which was Chinese, and there was softness and a
delicious languor in her nature which her father did not seem to
understand, and of which he did not appear to approve.
She knew that he was wealthy. She knew that his ways were not
straight ways, although that part of his business to which he had
admitted her as an assistant, and an able one, was legitimate
enough, or so it seemed.
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