response, Foh-Kyung made a stately bow. "Alas! I have made
a grievous mistake. The responsibility will be on my body. I thought all
were welcome. We go. Later on, perhaps, we may meet again."

The priest spoke hurriedly.

"I do not understand your meaning. Is this belief of such light weight
that you will toss it away for a sinful woman? Put her away, and come
and believe." But Foh-Kyung did not hear his words. As he turned away,
Dong-Yung followed close behind her lord and master, only half
comprehending, yet filled with a great fear. They went out again into
the sunshine, out across the flat green grass, under the iron gateway,
back into the Land of the Flowery Kingdom. Foh-Kyung did not speak until
he put Dong-Yung in the rickshaw.

"Little Wife of my Heart," he said, "stop at the jeweller's and buy thee
new ear-rings, these ear-rings of the sky-blue stone and sea-tears, and
have thy hair dressed and thy gowns perfumed, and place the two red
circles on the smile of thy cheeks. To-night we will feast. Hast thou
forgotten that to-night is the Feast of the Lanterns, when all good
Buddhists rejoice?"

He stood beside her rickshaw, in his imperial yellow garment hemmed with
the rainbow waves of the sea, and smiled down into her eyes.

"But the spirit God of love, the foreign-born spirit God?" said
Dong-Yung. "Shall we feast to him too?"

"Nay, it is not fitting to feast to two gods at once," said Foh-Kyung.
"Do as I have said."

He left her. Dong-Yung, riding through the sun-splashed afternoon,
buying coloured jewels and flowery perfume and making herself beautiful,
yet felt uneasy. She had not quite understood. A dim knowledge advanced
toward her like a wall of fog. She pressed her two hands against it and
held it off--held it off by sheer mental refusal to understand. In the
courtyard at home the children were playing with their lighted animals,
drawing their gaudy paper ducks, luminous with candle-light, to and fro
on little standards set on four wheels. At the gate hung a tall
red-and-white lantern, and over the roof floated a string of candle-lit
balloons. In the ancestral hall the great wife had lit the red candles,
speared on their slender spikes, before the tablets. In the kitchen the
cooks and amahs were busy with the feast-cooking. Candles were stuck
everywhere on the tables and benches. They threw little pools of light
on the floor before the stove and looked at the empty niche. In the
night it was mer