“We lived there for four or five weeks—all of us, your grandfather and his four sons—a runner found them the next day, and they came hot-haste. The service I’d done wasn’t much, just carrying two little things kitten-light, and not much more than kitten-big, from under a roof that was blazing to one that wasn’t—nothing but that and keeping my head while a gang of ‘the babies,’ as your people call their retainers, completely lost theirs; but the father made a mountain of it Omi-high. Chinese gratitude is gigantic—always. We lived there together as one family, I as free of the two girls as their brothers were, and when a new house was run up near where the other had been—your grandfather made ‘the babies’ work like Egyptian slaves—he made me welcome there, and I was as free to go into the ‘flowery’ courtyard and garden as their own brothers were; and I did so very much oftener than they did. He could not have allowed any Chinese man what he allowed me. He held that the race-bar put me as much out of personal bounds—as far as his daughters were concerned—as if I’d been the man in the moon. They might have married a vase or a man dead and cremated; but they could not marry an Englishman, and the thought of such a thing could never arise. He was right, and he was wrong. So I stayed at the mandarin’s home rather more than I did at the monastery—sat in the courtyard with the tulips and musk while Lotus tweaked her lute and Ruby sorted her silks and ‘pulled the flowers up’ in the silk on her loom. They were very alike—so alike that some of the servants, and the brother who saw them least often, could not always tell them apart; but I always could. The lady Ruby had the prettier laugh—a tinkle of silver bells—carried her head the prouder; Lotus had the softer eyes, her hands were a shade the tinier, her mouth had the longer bow—and I had touched her hand by chance, as it lay on my coat the time of the fire, and once again when we’d reached on one impulse to gather narcissus that grew by the brook where the monks caught their breakfast trout. I learned more Chinese in those four weeks than I’d learned in two years. . . . The usual thing happened—to both of us. It was a dream—a courtyard madness. But I planned to keep it. And one day, by the lily-pond, I touched her hand again and told her. And her eyes answered me until they fell from mine, and then their lids answered me—they were trembling, and her fingers fluttered and answered me too. I knew that I should never return to England but stay always in China. . . . When I told her father—I went and found him and told him then, leaving her alone there by the lily-pool. . . . I never saw her again. When I told him, his amazement was terrible. He was kind—very kind. But he convinced me. He shattered my dream. He showed me the thing I contemplated as the monstrous impossibility it was. In my reason, I think, I thanked him even then. He saved two lives from misery and lasting regrets. I know it now.