“Is it permitted to a small wife to worship the foreign-born God?” Dong-Yung lifted her eyes to the face of Foh-Kyung.  “Teach me, O my Lord Master!  My understanding is but young and fearful—­”

Foh-Kyung moved into the sunlight beside her.

“Their God loves all the world.  Their God is different, little Flower, from the painted images, full of blessings, not curses.  He loves even little girl babies that mothers would throw away.  Truly his heart is still more loving than the heart of a mother.”

“And yet I am fearful—­” Dong-Yung looked back into the shadows of the guest-hall, where the ancestral tablets glowed upon the wall, and crimson tapers stood ready before them.  “Our gods I have touched and handled.”

“Nay, in the Jesus way there is no fear left.”  Foh-Kyung’s voice dropped lower.  Its sound filled Dong-Yung with longing.  “When the wind screams in the chimneys at night, it is but the wind, not evil spirits.  When the summer breeze blows in at the open door, we need not bar it.  It is but the summer breeze from the rice-fields, uninhabited by witch-ghosts.  When we eat our morning rice, we are compelled to make no offering to the kitchen gods in the stove corner.  They cannot curse our food.  Ah, in the Jesus way there is no more fear!”

Dong-Yung drew away from her lord and master and looked at him anxiously.  He was not seeing her at all.  His eyes looked beyond, across the fragile, lily-petals, through the solid black wall, at a vision he saw in the world.  Dong-Yung bent her head to sniff the familiar sweet springtime orchid hanging from the jade stud on her shoulder.

“Your words are words of good hearing, O beloved Teacher.  Nevertheless, let me follow six paces behind.  I am not worthy to touch your hand.  Six paces behind, when the sun shines in your face, my feet walk in the shadow of your garments.”

Foh-Kyung gathered his gaze back from his visions and looked at his small wife, standing in a pool of sunshine before him.  Overhead the lazy crows flew by, winging out from their city roosts to the rice-fields for the day’s food.

“Tea-boiled eggs!” cried a vender from beyond the wall.  A man stopped at the gate, put down his shoulder-tray of food, and bargained with the ancient, mahogany-scalped gate-keeper.  Faint odours of food frying in oil stole out from the depths of the house behind him.  And Dong-Yung, very quiet and passive in the pose of her body, gazed up at Foh-Kyung with those strange, secretive, ardent eyes.  All around him was China, its very essence and sound and smell.  Dong-Yung was a part of it all; nay, she was even the very heart of it, swaying there in the yellow light among the lily-petals.

“Precious Jewel!  Yet it is sweeter to walk side by side, our feet stepping out into the sunlight together, and our shadows mingling behind.  I want you beside me.”

The last words rang with sudden warmth.  Dong-Yung trembled and crimsoned.  It was not seemly that a man speak to a woman thus, even though that man was a husband and the woman his wife, not even though the words were said in an open court, where the eyes of the great wife might spy and listen.  And yet Dong-Yung thrilled to those words.