The news occasioned universal lamentation, and two men were despatched with a reed mat to cover up the body.  When they got there they found his heart still warm, and when they had held him in an upright posture for some time, his breathing recommenced.  So they carried him home between them and administered liquid food through a reed-pipe.  Next morning, he recovered consciousness; but after several months he was still unable to move his hands and feet.  Moreover, the sores left by his thrashing festered in so disgusting a manner that his friends found him too troublesome, and one night deposited him in the middle of the road.  However, the passers-by, harrowed by his condition, never failed to throw him scraps of food.

So copious was his diet that in three months he recovered sufficiently to hobble with a stick.  Clad in a linen coat,—­which was knotted together in a hundred places, so that it looked as tattered as a quail’s tail,—­and carrying a broken saucer in his hand, he now went about the idle quarters of the town, earning his living as a professional beggar.

Autumn had now turned to winter.  He spent his nights in public lavatories and his days haunting the markets and booths.

One day when it was snowing hard, hunger and cold had driven him into the streets.  His beggar’s cry was full of woe and all who heard it were heart-rent.  But the snow was so heavy that hardly a house had its outer door open, and the streets were empty.

When he reached the eastern gate of An-i, about the seventh or eighth turning north of the Hsuun-li Wall, there was a house with the double-doors half open.

It was the house where Miss Li was then living, but the young man did not know.

He stood before the door, wailing loud and long.

Hunger and cold had given such a piteous accent to his cry that none could have listened unmoved.

Miss Li heard it from her room and at once said to her servant, “That is so-and-so.  I know his voice.”  She flew to the door and was horrified to see her old lover standing before her so emaciated by hunger and disfigured by sores that he seemed scarcely human.  “Can it be you?” she said.  But the young man was so overcome by bewilderment and excitement that he could not speak, but only moved his lips noiselessly.

She threw her arms round his neck, then wrapped him in her own embroidered jacket and led him to the parlour.  Here, with quavering voice, she reproached herself, saying, “It is my doing that you have been brought to this pass.”  And with these words she swooned.

Her mother came running up in great excitement, asking who had arrived.  Miss Li, recovering herself, said who it was.  The old woman cried out in rage:  “Send him away!  What did you bring him in here for?”