e our food. Ah, in
the Jesus way there is no more fear!"

Dong-Yung drew away from her lord and master and looked at him
anxiously. He was not seeing her at all. His eyes looked beyond, across
the fragile, lily-petals, through the solid black wall, at a vision he
saw in the world. Dong-Yung bent her head to sniff the familiar sweet
springtime orchid hanging from the jade stud on her shoulder.

"Your words are words of good hearing, O beloved Teacher. Nevertheless,
let me follow six paces behind. I am not worthy to touch your hand. Six
paces behind, when the sun shines in your face, my feet walk in the
shadow of your garments."

Foh-Kyung gathered his gaze back from his visions and looked at his
small wife, standing in a pool of sunshine before him. Overhead the lazy
crows flew by, winging out from their city roosts to the rice-fields for
the day's food.

"Tea-boiled eggs!" cried a vender from beyond the wall. A man stopped at
the gate, put down his shoulder-tray of food, and bargained with the
ancient, mahogany-scalped gate-keeper. Faint odours of food frying in
oil stole out from the depths of the house behind him. And Dong-Yung,
very quiet and passive in the pose of her body, gazed up at Foh-Kyung
with those strange, secretive, ardent eyes. All around him was China,
its very essence and sound and smell. Dong-Yung was a part of it all;
nay, she was even the very heart of it, swaying there in the yellow
light among the lily-petals.

"Precious Jewel! Yet it is sweeter to walk side by side, our feet
stepping out into the sunlight together, and our shadows mingling
behind. I want you beside me."

The last words rang with sudden warmth. Dong-Yung trembled and
crimsoned. It was not seemly that a man speak to a woman thus, even
though that man was a husband and the woman his wife, not even though
the words were said in an open court, where the eyes of the great wife
might spy and listen. And yet Dong-Yung thrilled to those words.

An amah called, "The morning rice is ready."

Dong-Yung hurried into the open room, where the light was still faint,
filtering in through a high-silled window and the door. A round, brown
table stood in the center of the room. In the corner of the room behind
stood the crescentic, white plaster stove, with its dull wooden
kettle-lids and its crackling straw. Two cooks, country women, sat in
the hidden corner behind the stove, and poked in the great bales of
straw and gossiped. Their voices