East.
She may have considered it her bounden duty only. Whether love or duty
furnished the motive I cannot tell, but after making all possible
inquiries to no purpose she determined to set out herself and search
for traces of the missing one. The shop and her belongings were sold
to provide money for the way, and the poor woman, forsaking all and
carrying the child strapped to her shoulders, turned with a bitter
heart from her former prosperous home to face the world on her
well-nigh hopeless quest. Of her wanderings I could get no record, and
she would probably, with Oriental inscrutability, have refused to even
talk about them, but wherever else they may have led her, in the
bitter winter of 1893 she was twenty miles up-river from Hukow at the
open port of Kiukiang and alone, her child having perished by the way,
begging food and prosecuting her inquiries. Chance led her to shelter
for a night in the ruined but beautiful pagoda which stands high above
the river on the cliff outside the city wall. To the old Buddhist
hermit in possession she told her oft-repeated tale, only once again
to receive the usual negative reply.

In the morning, however, as she was moving off on her daily trudge,
the hermit appeared, and after the customary Buddhistic salutation,
"O me tor foo,"[3] had been exchanged, he remarked that during the
night it recurred to him that about eighteen moons had passed since he
found the dead body of a man cast up naked on the opposite beach, and
that following the rule of his order for acquiring merit he had
carefully and reverently buried it.

The poor wanderer seemed at last to see some faint possibility of
reward for her dreary pilgrimage. She followed the hermit to the river
side, where his small and leaky sampan was drawn up on the mud. After
considerable effort the boat was launched by the feeble pair, and
taking her place in it she was rowed by the old man across the heaving
river, which is here more than a mile in width, to the opposite beach,
where a little above high-water mark the grave was found. Scraping
aside the loose sand and rubble, and raising the unfastened lid of the
rough coffin, the mouldering skeleton was unrecognisable. Quick as
thought the woman thrust her fingers into the crumbling mass and
raised an arm of the dead, on which was seen to be the half of a jade
bracelet. Immediately baring her own arm to the hermit's gaze she
displayed on it the other half of the same jewel.