She caught his eye. There were lightnings in it before which her dissembling vanished like silk on hot coals. She broke into peal after peal of laughter, and Wang beat his old head in an ecstasy of merriment. The fawn cropped the grass in complete indifference. But swiftly she became grave again. “I do not understand myself,” she told him. “It is simple enough.” “All the same, I don’t understand why, when I was so dearly in love with Yuan....” “In love with your left knee!” “What do you mean then? Was I not in love?” She reflected, almost prepared, now, to believe it. “It is true, there was always a hesitation. But I can explain that.” He doubled up with laughter. “I really can. There was a difference of flesh between us. He was a foreigner, you see.” The echoes of his laughter drifted to the mountains. She was a little mortified. “It is insulting of you not to believe me. I only know that I shall never love any man again.” Now the deep pleasures of the summer came back to her heart, giving it a twist. The fountains of Wang’s mirth were too much for him. His bleached and shrunken old body could hardly contain the elemental upwelling. The universe itself laughed at her in his old eyes as it had rained in Yuan’s. “Let us walk,” he gasped; “let us go home.” He wiped tears from his cheeks. Then once more the beauty of it overwhelmed him. “She can never love again!” He held his sides. “Well,” she expostulated, “there is nobody. I could not love my father or my old friend Ambrose. The rest bore me. I do not want love. I have this queer new pleasure in me instead.” They scrambled down the valleys, he subject to recurrent fits of amusement. She could not withstand him, and at last allowed herself to regard Yuan’s seriousness and her own bewilderment as a joke. “What has come to me?” she asked the old Sage. “Death,” he answered. Was this true? She felt as one who recognizes that a tide is about to seize and drown her. “If not dead, you are dying,” he continued. “Did not Yuan give you the mystic peach that shrivels the soul and leaves a house for another inhabitant?” “But you said I am to love,” she protested, displaying an agitation that came uppermost in spite of herself, an agitation that did not really seem to belong to her. “How can I love when I am dead and have no desire?” “Cannot the immortal take pleasure in love—in compelling lips, in hands that awaken, in...?” In so-and-so and in so-and-so. The old man made her blush with his account of the delights of the senses. “But you,” she interpolated—“you are a Sage ... you are above desire....” “A Sage is not necessarily a drivelling idiot,” he replied. “I am very old. It is more than a hundred years since I was interested in what may interest a younger man, and the immortal in-dweller has other objects with me. But there was a time.... The unnameable, when he takes the place of the self, has no objection whatever to making use of the furniture. But he is master of desire.”