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Chang See’s father an entirely new and unheard-of appellation. In a word, the petitioner’s friends one and all deserted him. Something seemed to have happened to them.
Something had happened to them. That something was the vivid remembrance of a little old lady with a thin face and cruel eyes, who was at the moment sitting in Peking, the virtual ruler of all China. Chang See had been lately active in fields that did not appeal to the dowager empress. He had been one of the group of brilliant reformers who had come so near winning the young emperor to their way of thinking, until that day in September when the empress had put down her foot, with its six-inch Manchu sole, made the emperor practically a prisoner in the palace, and anmounced that those who wished to change the existing order in China would please see her first. And if she saw them first———
