ng-room of the women and children. Eat with me."

"It has not been heard of in the Middle Kingdom for a woman to eat with
a man."

"Nevertheless, it shall be. Come!"

Dong-Yung entered slowly. The light in this dim room was all gathered
upon the person of Foh-Kyung, in the gleaming patterned roses of his
gown, in his deep amethyst ring, in his eyes. Dong-Yung came because of
his eyes. She crossed the room slowly, swaying with that peculiar grace
of small-footed women, till she stood at the table beside Foh-Kyung. She
was now even more afraid than when he would have cast the kitchen gods
into the fire. They were but gods, kitchen gods, that he was about to
break; this was the primeval bondage of the land, ancient custom.

"Give me thy hand and look up with thine eyes and thy heart."

Dong-Yung touched his hand. Foh-Kyung looked up as if he saw into the
ether beyond, and there saw a spirit vision of ineffable radiance. But
Dong-Yung watched him. She saw him transfigured with an inner light. His
eyes moved in prayer. The exaltation spread out from him to her, it
tingled through their finger-tips, it covered her from head to foot.

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."

Don