At night, when dusk and darkness curtained, he came to her tent, or threw himself down by her side on the ferns gaily, wearing once more his light English tweeds and carrying an English book in his hand, an English jest on his lips, or gossip of cricket and golf. He longed to read Yuan Mei (China’s garden genius of happiness, of thought, and of singing) to her here where the world was steeped in all that had moved Yuan Mei to song: longed to give her (because she was his, and he hers) what Yuan Mei, Tu Fu, and Ou-Yang Hsin had given him, what China gave him; but he bottled his longing up and read “Daniel Deronda,” or, instead, a novel from Mudie’s, a _Morning Post_ leader, or verses from _Punch_. His heart ached, but his nerve never failed or his vigilance slacked. And all the time China was calling him, claiming him, possessing him wholly, as a child in the womb of his mother. The child leapt. But the man stood to his ploughshare, held to his bond. And the fear in a woman’s eyes died. The coolies sniffed at the verdure about them, as they shouldered the chairs and boxes and trudged gaily on; for Chinese spring was turning to Chinese summer. They came on the edge of his home suddenly at noontide, a day of riotous color and warmth. The half-mile from the outer gate to the wide-flung, tulip-tinted dwelling looked but an easy breadth in the clear, ambient radiance: a long, leisurely house, that looked a series of houses, sprawled among persimmon trees and violet walks, the under-lip of each up-curled roof elaborately carved, a house so much lower than the trees beyond it that it looked, here from the hillside above it, like a clumped growth of red and pinkish mushrooms crowding close together in a nest of white and yellow lilies and ferns—for some of the roofs had been newly painted and varnished or glazed, and blazed red in the sunshine, and some were faded and blinked palely pink. A forest of oak-trees stretched in the distance. A _pai-fang_ with markings of gold and silver on its crimson lacquer stood spruce, graceful, and speckless in a garden of tulips scarcely a stone’s throw from a small shabby temple. Peasants—scantily clad, and clad too alike to show of what sex at a distance—squelched in a great paddy field and chattered, so it seemed—Ivy could not hear them so far—under their great sun hats as they bent to their wet, oozing work. An old woman was carrying on her back a bundle of faggots, larger than she, into a kiln-shaped outhouse; an urchin who wore very little but ropes of marigolds—one on his head, one on his hips, three round his neck—was perched impudently on a great, patient buffalo, driving it round and round a dripping water-wheel and thrashing it sternly with a long, harmless branch of young, pliant willow. Peacocks promenaded the terrace. Ducks quacked thirstily in a clovered meadow. A beautiful mare nuzzled the colt that was nursing her and washed its back with a fondling tongue. A cow called to her calf.