“But,” she added quickly, “thou art right to go, King-lo, and I would not have it otherwise. I am shamed that thou must lie in the barbarian land, shamed that thou mayst not dwell _here_, as thou shouldst, with thy Chinese wives about thee and thy small-footed concubines and thy scores of slave-girls. My honorable lord had many—more than he could count, or cared to—but I counted them all, and I ruled them well. All the province knew what a Number-one I was, and they heard it and spoke of it in the Vermilion Palace at Pekin. My lord, thy father’s father, boy, took no heed: he cared more for the stickpins in my hair than for all the painted roses on his under-women’s faces; but I took great heed of all his women and their children and of all that was his. And I burn in flame that no such state as he kept thou shalt keep—in thy celestial native land. But thou art right. I applaud. Did I forbid, thou wouldst disobey,”—again the crackled chuckle—“and it pridens me that thou wouldst. A Sên must pay his score at the inn of life. Thou hast made a marriage-bargain with a foreign woman and made it in her own barbarian way. It was thy weakness and thy sin. But now the tally-hour has come, and thou must pay. The man who cheats a woman, or mocks her with a payment in coin she does not value, is lower than the vermin that feeds on putrid shellfish, fattens on the slime-bellied scavengers of the ocean. Go—when thou wilt. And I will raise a _pai-fang_ for thy pardon of our gods; I will build a great temple on the hill where the peach trees cram the melons on its slope and the cypresses wear the winter snow on its crest; and I will make the old temple, where thou madest thy young play as a child, a riot of blooming flowers, a hymn of running water. The nightingale and the kingfisher shall join in its song, and I will cram the temple hall with jades and yellow roses. That shall be thy penance here in China, as loneliness and longing shall be thy penance in England—the England of thy wife; and perchance the gods will accept my bounty and thy pain, and thou shalt come again to thy people in the garden of on high. We will not often send message or courier to each other, I and thou, for it is ill to scald a sore; but thou shalt think of me, and I shall think of thee, across the oceans and the years. I shall hold my pride in thee for the sacrifice thou makest and the troth thou keepest even to the end; for it proves thee worthy of the milk I gave thy father, O, babe of my babe. Greatness is built on sacrifice, always it is so. I bless thee, and I bless thy sacrifice, Sên King-lo.” He rose, unsteadily, and then k’o-towed before her slowly; once, again, and then again. Then he slipped to her feet and laid his hand upon her girdle and his face against her knees. And Sên Ya Tin laid her palms on his hair and smoothed it softly.