Foh-Kyung drooped her hand and moved.  Dong-Yung leaned nearer.

“I, too, would believe the Jesus way.”

In the peculiar quiet of mid-afternoon, when the shadows begin to creep down from the eaves of the pagodas and zigzag across the rice-fields to bed, Foh-Kyung and Dong-Yung arrived at the camp-ground of the foreigners.  The lazy native streets were still dull with the end of labour.  At the gate of the camp-ground the rickshaw coolies tipped down the bamboo shafts, to the ground.  Dong-Yung stepped out quickly, and looked at her lord and master.  He smiled.

“Nay, I do not fear,” Dong-Yung answered, with her eyes on his face.  “Yet this place is strange, and lays a coldness around my heart.”

“Regard not their awkward ways,” said Foh-Kyung, as he turned in at the gate; “in their hearts they have the secret of life.”

The gate-keeper bowed, and slipped the coin, warm from Foh-Kyung’s hand, into his ready pocket.

“Walk beside me, little Wife of my Heart.”  Foh-Kyung stopped in the wide gravelled road and waited for Dong-Yung.  Standing there in the sunlight, more vivid yet than the light itself, in his imperial yellow robes he was the end of life, nay, life itself, to Dong-Yung.  “We go to the house of the foreign priest to seek until we find the foreign God.  Let us go side by side.”

Dong-Yung, stepping with slow, small-footed grace, walked beside him.

“My understanding is as the understanding of a little child, beloved Teacher; but my heart lies like a shell in thy hand, its words but as the echo of thine.  My honour is great that thou do not forget me in the magnitude of the search.”

Dong-Yung’s pleated satin skirts swayed to and fro against the imperial yellow of Foh-Kyung’s robe.  Her face coloured like a pale spring blossom, looked strangely ethereal above her brocade jacket.  Her heart still beat thickly, half with fear and half with the secret rapture of their quest and her lord’s desire for her.

Foh-Kyung took a silken and ivory fan from an inner pocket and spread it in the air.  Dong-Yung knew the fan well.  It came from a famous jeweller’s on Nanking Road, and had been designed by an old court poet of long ago.  The tiny ivory spokes were fretted like ivy-twigs in the North, but on the leaves of silk was painted a love-story of the South.  There was a tea-house, with a maiden playing a lute, and the words of the song, fantastic black ideographs, floated off to the ears of her lover.  Foh-Kyung spread out its leaves in the sun, and looked at it and smiled.”

“Never is the heart of man satisfied,” he said, “alone.  Neither when the willow fuzz flies in the spring, or when the midnight snow silvers the palms.  Least of all is it satisfied when it seeks the presence of God above.  I want thee beside me.”

Dong-Yung hid her delight.  Already for the third time he said those words—­those words that changed all the world from one of a loving following-after to a marvelous oneness.