At last she sent him to his rest, for the day was breaking, and as he moved to go, she held his sleeve a moment, and said, “I like thy woman, the girl with thy mother’s milk-name. She is a woman of the barbarians, but she is a sash-wearer, Sên King-lo; I like thy English woman. And she too shall have a taper and a crimson slip of silk-paper prayer in the temple I will build, and another in the hall of the old temple over yonder beyond the oak-trees where thou used to make thy playing in the courtyard. And her name shall not be taboo or coarsely spoken in the harem-courtyards of thy kindred. For she has worn a girdle of thorns under her inner garments here, Sên King-lo, and she has borne it quietly and bravely like the sash-wearer that she is. She has neither scratched nor whimpered. If she bears thee a girl-child, I charge thee then to send me word, for it shall have my stomacher of diamonds and my gold-lacquered tobacco-box with the lizard of rubies on its lid.” Then he left her, and she sat alone while the old water-clock dripped the morning hours away. And Sên King-lo lay a little on his mat, in the room that he’d used so as a boy—lay down on his mat because Sên Ya Tin had commanded him. Soon he rose, and when he had bathed and perfumed his hands, he lit a taper before the ancestral tablet in the _ko’tang_ and went out through the courtyard and the twisting yellow paths, till he stood alone beneath the cypress-trees on the eastern hill. CHAPTER XLIX June flowers grew in the grass, a beryl and cinnabar sky crowned and mantled the world. The trees were heavy and big with leaf, grave and gay with a score of greens. Bees hummed in the wild roses; an old apple-tree, late but lusty of blossom, buffeted and bent by a thousand gales—but its good roots held—lay prone on the ground, its flowers lay a perfumed white and rose veil heaped on ferns and blue harebells; a baby squirrel sat bolt up on the prostrate gnarled trunk, industriously washing his baby face. The summer air had a score of scents and bore on its fragrant warmth one message. And married birds were teaching their babies to fly. The flowers that had bloomed in the wood at the Potomac’s edge were blooming here. The same butterflies swam above them. They were wonderful old apple-trees—the prone one here and the prone one there. But when the apples of this one ripened they’d be insipid and tasteless, as almost all Chinese apples are, more ornamental than eatable, but deliciously scented and valued for that; and the fruit of the other tree had ripened at Ivy’s wedding-day as crisp of flesh and full of sour-sweet wine as the apples that grow in Albemarle County.