come in suddenly and saw her
husband replacing the long blue vase in which she kept her rose leaves
in order to dry them. He made some excuse about its not looking very
steady, and appeared to be just setting it right, and Lili-Tsee
pretended there was nothing out of the common in his putting the vase
straight. The moment he had gone out of the house, though, she was up on
a stool like lightning, and in a moment she had fished the looking-glass
out of the vase. She took it carefully in her hand, wondering whatever
it could be, but when she looked in it the terrible truth was clear.
What was it she saw?

Why, the portrait of a woman, and she had believed that Kiki-Tsum was so
good, and so fond, and so true.

Her grief was at first too deep for any words. She just sat down on the
floor with the terrible portrait in her lap, and rocked herself
backwards and forwards. This, then, was why her husband came home so
many times in the day. It was to look at the portrait of the woman she
had just seen.

Suddenly a fit of anger seized her, and she gazed at the glass again.
The same face looked at her, but she wondered how her husband could
admire such a face, so wicked did the dark eyes look: there was an
expression in them that she certainly had not seen the first time she
had looked at it, and it terrified her so much that she made up her mind
not to look at it again.

She had no heart, however, for anything, and did not even make any
attempt to prepare a meal for her husband. She just went on sitting
there on the floor, nursing the portrait, and at the same time her
wrath. When later on Kiki-Tsum arrived, he was surprised to find nothing
ready for their evening meal, and no wife. He walked through to the
other rooms, and was not long left in ignorance of the cause of the
unusual state of things.

"So this is the love you professed for me! This is the way in which you
treat me, before we have even been married a year!"

"What do you mean, Lili-Tsee?" asked her husband, in consternation,
thinking that his poor wife had taken leave of her senses.

"What do I mean? What do you mean? I should think. The idea of your
keeping portraits in my rose-leaf vase. Here, take it and treasure it,
for I do not want it, the wicked, wicked woman!" and here poor Lili-Tsee
burst out crying.

"I cannot understand," said her bewildered husband.

"Oh, you can't?" she said, laughing hysterically. "I can, though, well
enough. You like that h