he was a little, weazened, toothless old
woman toward the last; but ever she was the wonder woman, and she carried
my heart in hers to the end. For an old man, three score and ten, I
still retained great strength. My face was withered, my yellow hair
turned white, my broad shoulders shrunken, and yet much of the strength
of my sea-cuny days resided in the muscles left me.

Thus it was that I was able to do what I shall now relate. It was a
spring morning on the cliffs of Fusan, hard by the highway, that the Lady
Om and I sat warming in the sun. We were in the rags of beggary,
prideless in the dust, and yet I was laughing heartily at some mumbled
merry quip of the Lady Om when a shadow fell upon us. It was the great
litter of Chong Mong-ju, borne by eight coolies, with outriders before
and behind and fluttering attendants on either side.

Two emperors, civil war, famine, and a dozen palace revolutions had come
and gone; and Chong Mong-ju remained, even then the great power at Keijo.
He must have been nearly eighty that spring morning on the cliffs when he
signalled with palsied hand for his litter to be rested down that he
might gaze upon us whom he had punished for so long.

"Now, O my king," the Lady Om mumbled low to me, then turned to whine an
alms of Chong Mong-ju, whom she affected not to recognize.

And I knew what was her thought. Had we not shared it for forty years?
And the moment of its consummation had come at last. So I, too, affected
not to recognize my enemy, and, putting on an idiotic senility, I, too,
crawled in the dust toward the litter whining for mercy and charity.

The attendants would have driven me back, but with age-quavering cackles
Chong Mong-ju restrained them. He lifted himself on a shaking elbow, and
with the other shaking hand drew wider apart the silken curtains. His
withered old face was transfigured with delight as he gloated on us.

"O my king," the Lady Om whined to me in her beggar's chant; and I knew
all her long-tried love and faith in my emprise were in that chant.

And the red wrath was up in me, ripping and tearing at my will to be
free. Small wonder that I shook with the effort to control. The
shaking, happily, they took for the weakness of age. I held up my brass
begging bowl, and whined more dolefully, and bleared my eyes to hide the
blue fire I knew was in them, and calculated the distance and my strength
for the leap.

Then I was swept away in a blaze of r