"That's right!" Guangxu suddenly realized, and quickly touched in his arms, took out a small exquisite copper compass, and immediately found the direction.

The pony carried them forward slowly, Lin Boliang took the map into his arms, and lay comfortably on the horse's back, looking at the sunset on the horizon in a daze.

On the hillside in the distance, Lin Yiqing put away the binoculars, and the Misty Hidden Warrior Guardian noticed that there was a subtle smile on the corner of Lin Yiqing's mouth.

"The emperor's body is getting stronger and stronger, and his mind is also very clever, and Liang Beile has contributed a lot." Wuyin Wu Emon said to Lin Yiqing with a smile, "In the future, the emperor will be in power, and Liang Beile will definitely be able to be the emperor's auxiliary minister." ”

"You can't speculate about the emperor's house as an ordinary person." Lin Yiqing smiled slightly, although he put down the binoculars, his eyes were still staring at the direction where his son and the little emperor's backs disappeared, "However, it is still necessary to give them a good childhood." ”

"That little girl from Boren, is the adopted daughter of an old man who sells tea nearby, she is inherited from another family, I think her qualifications are okay, do you want to buy her for training, she can be used to protect the emperor and Liang Beile." Kirihide Takeemon suggested to Lin Yiqing.

"If you think you can, then that's it." Lin Yiqing nodded in agreement.

"During the period when the lord went abroad, I plan to increase the manpower here, of course, in order not to make the emperor and the queen mother suspicious, all the children are arranged, and Youyou is also among them."

"Yes. I am not in Beijing, so I must protect the emperor and Bai Liang and their children. ”

"Don't worry, your subordinates will be foolproof."

"Remember to transfer Linglong back from North Korea, there should be nothing to do with her over there. If Master Eagle is willing, he might as well come over and pretend to be an old fisherman or something. ”

"Subordinates obey."

"By the way, Fang Boqian, have you arranged someone?"

"It's all arranged."

"Where's the people?"

"According to the will of the lord, the two sisters, selected from the nursery in Shanghai, have been trained on the island for five years, all kinds of skills have been mastered, now twelve years old, Fang Boqian has seen them, can no longer hold themselves, it is said that Fang has already given a dowry, and they have taken them to the private house in Shanghai, and they will be married after escorting the adults back from abroad."

"Good."

"How does the lord know that Fang Boqian has such a hobby? He now only has one wife, no other concubines, and he has not shown this to his subordinates. ”

"Hehe, this is it...... I can't understand a sentence or two, and I'll tell you carefully when I get back. ”

As Lin Yiqing expected, at this moment, the person they were talking about named Fang Boqian had already flown to the two girls' hearts.

Fang Boqian threw the cigarette butt of his cigar into the water, rested his elbows against the ship's bulwark, and gazed contemplatively at the waves.

It was as if his mind had deserted halfway through, taking him thousands of miles away.

"Lovely little girls, how happy they will be!" He muttered in English as he opened the chimney and lazily looked at its contents. "What joy and what amazement! Lovely little girl! Not to mention that after a year; They'll be amazed. ”

He was a man of about thirty years of age, with a dark face, tanned by the sun; He had beautiful black eyes, and a feminine smile in them sparkled from under his eyelashes; A thick mustache and beard cover the entire lower half of his face. He was tall and strong; He wears a loose gray suit and a fedora hat that carelessly covers his black hair. His name is Fang Boqian, and he is a pipe band of the steam-gunner "Jianwei" of the Daqian Imperial Navy, and he is now on his way to Shanghai on the British first-class steamship "Hydra." He was one of the ship's first-class passengers who lived in the stern cabin.

There were very few passengers in the first class cabin on the Hydra. An old wool merchant in Qianguo, who made a fortune in the British colonies, returned to Qianguo with his wife and daughters; A 35-year-old British governess went to Shanghai to marry an English man who had been engaged for 15 years; The sentimental daughter of a wealthy Australian wine merchant is going to the country of Qianguo to relax; These people and Fang Boqian were all first-class passengers on the ship.

Fang Boqian is the life and soul of the ship, and everyone likes him. He sat at the end of the table, and he served as an assistant to the captain while he did his best to entertain him at a friendly banquet. He opened a bottle of champagne and toasted to every guest at the banquet; He told jokes, and he took the lead in making a loud laugh, and whoever could not even laugh out loud out of sheer like-mindedness would be a sluggish rough man. He was a good hand at guessing cards, playing chess, and all kinds of lively and merry games, which caused the circle of people around the cabin to bury their heads in innocent amusement, and the hurricane might whistle over their heads, but they turned a deaf ear; But he happily admits that he has no talent for playing cards and chess.

In fact, Fang Guanband is by no means a very learned gentleman. The pale-faced governess had tried to talk to him about modern literature, but he only stroked his beard, glared at her, and said occasionally, "Ah, yes! And "Hah, of course!" ”

The sentimental young lady, who had returned to her hometown to finish her studies, had used Shelley and Byron to test him, and he openly laughed at her as if poetry were a joke. The wool merchant talked to him about politics, but he didn't seem to know much about it; So they let him do his own thing.

Smoking a cigar and chatting with the sailor, leaning against the bulwark and gazing at the water, he used his own particular way to make everyone think he was easy to get along with. However, when the "Hydra" was only a week's way away from Qianguo, everyone noticed the changes in Fang Boqian. He became restless and unsettled; Sometimes elated, his laughter resounded in the cabin; Sometimes sullen and meditative.

When Fang Boqian lit his cigar in the twilight, the setting sun was sinking behind the waves. The sailors told him that afternoon that he would be able to see the shores of Qianguo in three days. "I'm going to jump into the first boat that beckons us and go ashore," he cried out, "I'm going to go ashore in a little rowboat, and my God, if it gets to this point, I'm going to swim ashore." ”

His friends in the first class all laughed at his impatience, except for the pale governess: she sighed and looked at him and complained that time was passing too slowly, pushed away the wine she had not drunk, threw herself irritably on the cabin sofa, ran up and down the ladder at the lift, and stared at the rolling waves.

When the crimson edge of the setting sun sank into the water, the governess walked up the ladder at the lift and went up to the deck for a walk, while the other travelers sat down and drank. She stopped as she approached Fang Boqian and stood beside him, looking at the fading scarlet in the western sky.

This lady was very quiet and shy, rarely participated in the entertainment of first class, never laughed, and spoke very little; But she and Fang Boqian have been very good friends throughout the journey.

"Miss Mary, do you feel bad with my cigar?" He took the cigar from the corner of his mouth and said in proficient English.

"It's not in the way at all; Please keep smoking. I just came up to watch the sunset. What a lovely twilight! ”

"Yes, it's cute, probably," he replied impatiently, "but it's been too long, too long!" There are still several long days, and several tiresome nights, before I can get on land. ”

"Yes," said Miss Mary, with a sigh. "Would you like the time to be shorter?"

"Me?" Fang Boqian said loudly. "Of course I hope so. What about you? ”

"Not at all."

"But don't you have a beloved there? Isn't there someone you love looking forward to your coming? ”

"I hope so," she said solemnly. The two of them were silent for a moment. He snorted impatiently on his cigar, as if his fidgeting could speed up the voyage of a steamer; She looked at the fading sunset with her melancholy blue eyes. It was an eye that seemed to be amblyopic from looking too closely at a lead-printed book and fine embroidery, an eye that had quietly lost its luster from the crying of a lonely midnight night.

"Look!" Fang Boqian suddenly pointed in the opposite direction to Miss Mary's distant view, and said, "The crescent moon has come out. ”

She looked up at the pale Moth Eyebrow, her own face almost as pale. Bleak.

"This was the first time we saw the crescent moon on a ship! We must wish! Fang Boqian said, "I know what I want to wish." ”

"What is it?"

"I wish we were home sooner."

"My wish is that we will not be disappointed when we arrive in Qianguo," the governess said sadly.

"Disappointment!"

He jumped up as if he had been beaten and asked her what she meant by disappointment.

"I mean," she said, speaking quickly, her thin hands waving anxiously, "I mean, when this long journey was coming to an end, the hope in my heart sank: a sick fear came over me, and I feared that in the end, everything would turn out badly. The man I went back to meet with him may have changed his mind about me; Or, perhaps, he retains all his old affection until the moment he sees me, and then at the sight of my haggard pale face, he loses that affection in an instant, for, Mr. Fang, fifteen years ago, when I sailed to Shanghai, I was called a handsome girl; Or maybe he was so changed by the world that he became selfish and mercenary, or maybe he welcomed me for my fifteen years of savings. Besides, he may be dead. He may have been in good health, perhaps, until a week before we landed, and in the last week he might have contracted a fever and died an hour before our ship dropped anchor. I imagined these things, Mr. Fang, playing these episodes in my mind, I felt the pain twenty times a day, twenty times a day! "Well, I think about it a thousand times a day," she repeatedly. ”

Fang Boqian stood motionless, his cigar in his hand, listening to her so intently that when she said the last word, his fingers relaxed, and the cigar fell into the water.

"I wondered," she continued, not so much to him as to herself—"I wondered, looking back, and thinking of how hopeful I had been when I set sail; At that time, I did not expect to be disappointed, I just painted the joy of reunion, imagining the words to be said, the tone of my voice, the expression of my expression; But by the last month of the journey, day after day, hour after hour, my heart sank, my hopeful illusions vanished, and I feared the end, as if I knew that I was going to a funeral in Qianguo. ”

Fang Boqian suddenly changed his attitude and turned his face to look at his companion, with a frightened look on his face. She saw in the pale light that his cheeks had lost their blood.

"What a fool!" He exclaimed, clenching his fists into the side of the ship, "I am amazed at this, what a fool I am!" Why did you come to tell me these things? I am going straight back to meet my beloved woman, to meet two girls whose hearts are as faithful as the light of the sky, and I do not wish to find any change in them, just as I do not wish to find another sun in the sky tomorrow, why do you come at this time to scare me into insanity? When I was about to go home to my dear girls, why did you try to stuff this kind of thinking into my mind? ”

"Your lover," she said, "is very different. There is no reason why my fear frightens you. I'm going to Qianguo to reunite with the man I got engaged to fifteen years ago. He was too poor to get married; I was recommended to be a governess in a wealthy family, and I persuaded him to let me accept the position and leave him, so that he could be free and unfettered to find his way out of the world, and that I could save a little money to support us as we began to live together. I never thought I would stay abroad for that long, but he was in a bad situation in Qianguo. That's my experience, and you know how scared I am. They shouldn't affect you. My case is a special one. ”

"The same is true of my situation," said Fang Boqian impatiently, "I tell you that my situation is also a special case, and although I swear to you, until this moment I have not feared the outcome of the voyage home. But you're right, your fears have nothing to do with me. You've been abroad for fifteen years; Within fifteen years, all sorts of things can happen. Oh, and since I left my hometown, until this month, it's only been half a year in total. What can happen in such a short period of time? ”

Miss Mary looked at him with a sad smile, but did not speak. His feverish passion, and his natural cheerfulness and impatience, were all new and fresh to her, so she looked at him with half envy and half pity.

"O my handsome little love! My elegant, innocent, amorous little love! Do you know, Miss Mary," he said, with the same hopeful attitude as before, "and when I left home, they were all asleep, with their dolls in their arms, and I left only a few lines of scribbling to tell them why their husbands, who loved them faithfully, had left them behind. ”

"The first time I met my little guys, I was the captain of a small gunboat. We were stationed in a small harbor town, and my lover and I fell in love at first sight, however, soon my father heard that I had married two penniless little girls, and he wrote me a furious letter informing me to stop paying my allowance. Since the poor gunboat I was in had no oil and water, and I lived on my salary alone, and I had to provide for two handsome young girls, I tried to work hard to convince the officers of my talents, so that I could get a promotion to the important warship. ”

"So did you succeed?" Miss Mary asked.

"It took a long disappointment to succeed; My love has had a purifying effect on me, so that I will not be corrupted and depraved. I worked unwaveringly to the end; I'm finally victorious. This time back in Shanghai, I will be appointed captain of an important warship, and will have the opportunity to escort a minister of great standing to Europe. As long as I can successfully complete the task, I will be richly rewarded by the imperial court. In this way, I can bring them a comfortable and happy life. ”

In his vigor and determination, in the victorious successes in which he was proud, in his understanding of the difficulties he had conquered, and in the possession of a heroic spirit in Zaito, the pale governess could not help but look at him with astonishment and admiration.

"How heroic and tenacious you are!" She said.

"Heroic and tenacious!" He said aloud, letting out a loud laugh of joy. "Am I not working for my sweethearts? Wasn't it their beautiful little hands beckoning me to go forward and to a happy future during that whole bleak and desolate trial? Well, I have seen them sitting beside me in my cosy and warm home, holding our children, and I can see them as clearly as I saw her in that happy newlywed life. …… Luckily, it was all over, and I was able to stay with them for a while before I left. ”

"But during all this time you never wrote to your lovers?"

"It wasn't written until a week before the ship set sail. I waited for the time to turn; When luck came, I wrote to them to tell them that I would soon be back in Shanghai, almost at the same time as the letter. ”

After this he fell into a reverie, slowly puffing out the smoke of his cigar in contemplation. His companions did not bother him. The last sunset of summer vanished, leaving only the pale light of the crescent moon.

Fang Boqian threw away his cigar after a while, turned to the governess, and said in a loud voice: "Miss Mary, if, when I arrive in Qianguo, I hear that something unfortunate has happened to my lover, I will immediately fall down and die." (To be continued.) )