“We did like you. We allowed ourselves the gratification of studying your very pleasing appearance, and only the laws of politeness prevented us from listening to your elegant conversation.” “You saw us!” cried the Sages. “Look!” said Yuan, introducing Lychnis to a cabinet in the wall. She looked in, and swung round at him on her hips. “The _Floating Leaf_! My mother, knitting under the awning! Oh! can you see inside things, too? Or in the dark?” She flushed and frowned, remembering her afternoon with Ambrose under the plum-tree in blossom, when she had given herself to his regard. “This adds a terror to life,” observed Quentin. “It teaches us to be careful.” “One can invent many things when it is appropriate to invent them,” said Yuan, “and there are several matters on this Rock that may interest you during your visit to our valley.” “Excellent!” said Lord Sombrewater, and indicated a desire that the boats should be brought. So they were conducted back to the stairway, but not before Hsiao, rising abruptly from his meditation, had executed in three or four sweeps a painting of half a melon. “What skill!” exclaimed Terence. “What sweeping brushwork! And really, what a significant melon! One would say that it was the most significant object in the universe. It leads the mind out to those half-realized worlds that are interwoven with ours.” “It is merely,” said Hsiao Chai, “that I have drawn the reality of the melon. You are a painter, too, I know—a European painter; that is, a painter of superficial appearances.” “As a matter of fact,” said Sir Richard, “he paints souls, emanations, auras and things.” “Oh, that!” said Hsiao, with indifference, and they descended the stairway to the marble quay. They floated off in the little boats down water lanes among the lotuses, and once more the three brilliant and bowing figures resolved themselves into one. “It is a charming dragon,” sang out Quentin to Lychnis; but she pulled out her jade combs and disappeared in a cascade of hair. “Just as,” notes Ambrose, “some slender and savage fairy might vanish in a forest cave to interrogate her thoughts in solitude.” For, as she confessed in due course, her mind was entirely taken up with a picture of that still unexplained island, with its marble quay, its writhing staircase, its pavilions, paths and cypresses, its vermilion theorem in some unfamiliar geometry perched up in the trees. He tells us that there was no doubt in his mind that their journey to the valley had in some way been compelled by that keen-eyed young man, or by his hilarious great-grandparent, but for what object was at present not clear. 23