“I say,” Ambrose replied, “that this is false sentiment. Love of a father is one thing; love of someone else is another. You should not be jealous of any kind of love that is not specifically yours to claim. Without jealousy, or, as our Chinese friends would say, without desire, or, as I may qualify it, without the addition of an inappropriate desire to the specific and proper desire of a father, or of a lover, as the case may be, there would exist no clash, or undue passion.” Lord Sombrewater observed him. “You would not permit anything that might occur to alter whatever the relation between you and Lychnis may be?” “There is a specific and possibly unique friendship between Lychnis and me which, if I do not allow it to be disturbed by irrelevant humours, can be left to take care of itself.” “That tells me little.” “Not having been choked by weeds, it has become a thing by itself, with life and a destiny. I have only to keep it pure of irrelevant desires.” “You are an extraordinary man. If you would not mind my asking—if anything were to happen, and we left her here in China, would you miss her? Would you, let us say, be aware of a hiatus?” “The mind,” Ambrose records himself as saying, “is its own place, as the poet so justly says, agreeing with our Chinese friends. Desire perishes, and that which is without desire is immortal.” “I’m hanged if you don’t out-Wang old Wang!” Lord Sombrewater relit his cigar. Then he suddenly exploded: “And by God! Ambrose, I agree absolutely with Lychnis about Sprot! Out he shall go!” It was lucky, Ambrose thought, that there should be someone handy to take off the full torrent of Lord Sombrewater’s emotion. 31 Lychnis, when she had given Ambrose an account of her doings, went swiftly in her short white dress under the heavy summer trees to the mooring-raft of red-painted bamboo, unfastened her coracle, and paddled through water lanes among lotuses to the island. She saw Hsiao in an arbour by the water’s edge, and waved in a friendly manner, but he was asleep. She brought her coracle to the marble quay, ascended the dragon-staircase, and sped along the ridge of the island, passing old Wang in meditation by a dung-heap. She climbed into the vermilion summer-house among the tree-tops, but Yuan was not there. She went out on to the verandah, and stood looking down over the scarlet rail into the Lake, where golden shapes of fish were passing like half-visible summer clouds. She saw the roof of Hsiao’s arbour and his two feet sticking out.