“And now I am very happy; just as you will be very happy.”

“I am always happy since my lord took me for his small wife.”  Dong-Yung matched her happiness with the happiness of the foreign-born woman, proudly, with assurance.  In her heart she knew no woman, born to eat bitterness, had ever been so happy as she in all the worlds beneath the heavens.  She looked around her, beyond the failure of the foreign woman’s garden, at the piled, peaked roofs of China looking over the wall.  The fragrance of a blossoming plum-tree stole across from a Chinese courtyard, and a peach-branch waved pink in the air.  A wonder of contentment filled Dong-Yung.

All the while Foh-Kyung was talking.  Dong-Yung turned back from all the greenness around her to listen.  He sat very still, with his hands hid in his sleeves.  The wave-ridged hem of his robe—­blue and green and purple and red and yellow—­was spread out decorously above his feet.  Dong-Yung looked and looked at him, so still and motionless and so gorgeously arrayed.  She looked from his feet, long, slim, in black satin slippers, and close-fitting white muslin socks, to the feet of the foreign priest.  His feet were huge, ugly black things.  From his feet Dong-Yung’s eyes crept up to his face, over his priestly black clothes, rimmed with stiff white at wrist and throat.  Yes, his face was even as the face of a priest, of one who serves between the gods and men, a face of seeing eyes and a rigid mouth.  Dong-Yung shuddered.

“And so we have come, even as the foreign-born God tells us, a man and his wife, to believe the Jesus way.”

Foh-Kyung spoke in a low voice, but his face smiled.  Dong-Yung smiled, too, at his open, triumphant declarations.  She said over his words to herself, under her breath, so that she would remember them surely when she wanted to call them back to whisper to her heart in the dark of some night.  “We two, a man and his wife”—­only dimly, with the heart of a little child, did Dong-Yung understand and follow Foh-Kyung; but the throb of her heart answered the hidden light in his eyes.

The foreign-born priest stood up.  The same light shone in his eyes.  It was a rapture, an exaltation.  Suddenly an unheard-of thing happened.  The outside kingdom woman put her arms around Dong-Yung!  Dong-Yung was terrified.  She was held tight against the other woman’s shoulder.  The foreign-born woman used a strange perfume.  Dong-Yung only half heard her whispered words.

“We are like that, too.  We could not be separated.  Oh, you will be happy!”

Dong-Yung thought of the other woman.  “In her heart she is humble and seemly.  It is only her speech and her ways that are unfitting.”

“We are going into the chapel a moment,” said the priest.  “Will you come, too?”

Dong-Yung looked at Foh-Kyung, a swift upward glance, like the sudden sweep of wings.  She read his answer in his eyes.  He wanted her to come.  Not even in the temple of the foreign-born God did he wish to be without her.