All was turning brown in the woods. Not a green leaf of summer. Nothing but early twilight falling over the mountain hut, and sad autumn rain. Yet, oddly, she did not feel a commensurate gloom. The clouds drove across the sky, now lowering and resentful, now swift and angry, now melting in vapour of tears, now piling onward high and contemptuous. But her spirit did not answer these changes; it remained calm; it derived a satisfaction from the magnificence of the moving cloudscape; it exulted, even, in the deep and steady passion of the waterfall pouring from the wooded shoulder of a mountain, in the vast tranquillity of the high crags that floated above seas of rain. She stood in the shelter of an overhung rock—a tiny, green-robed figure in the majesty of the mountains—and examined her state of mind. Where was her grief? Washed away on the rain that swept in gusts over the distant Lake. Where was the bundle of moods that made up her troublesome self? Blown away on the winds that tore through the pines, shattered and obliterated like the leaves of summer. Had she any regret for her loneliness? She was incredulous to find that she desired no companion, that she had need of no human being. Had she any fear of the solitude of the mountains? She looked round at the wizard shapes of pine-tree and rock to see if she could frighten herself, and there was nothing in her mind but a strange, sweet, and growing exultation. All alone under the huge overhung crag she laughed her tiny insect laugh—and checked herself, for surely it was absurd that she felt no grief. But there it was, a sensation as if waves out of heaven had flowed into the body that her self, Lychnis, had vacated. Such a thing was preposterous, she decided; and pursued her way homeward, resolvedly denying the almost intolerable pleasure that invaded her. She walked with the heavy gait of one who suffers. Then, fronting her, in a thicket by a glade, she perceived the merry, blanched face of Wang Li, peeping among brown leaves that fluttered and danced on his aged bald head. A wild fawn nuzzled in his hand. He called her, and she approached him with the demure gait of one who is sorrow-stricken, but underneath this dissembling her heart beat like a bird’s, for she seemed to be standing within the play of forces that flowed from him. Out of the corner of her eye she stole a glance at the smiling, scant-bearded visage. He was unguessably old, yet younger than the flowers that had been in the glade that April. He was full of a frightening, unhuman wisdom; on his face there played the wrinkles of a vast laughter. And unmistakably she found in herself something corresponding. “So Yuan has abandoned you,” he said, “and you do not know where to find some relief from your temporary sorrow.”