And as he waited for the rougher paroxysm of her grieving to wear itself a little out, he saw that it was an old apple-tree that lay upon the ground, an apple-tree struck down by some raging storm of China, in one of those fury times when the Yellow Sorrow lashed and churned its low banks into wide, endless miles of hideous flooded wreckage and of seaweed thick with stark and twisted floating human bodies, and when angry winds mowed peasant homes and huts of mat and reeds as sickles mow the ripened grass; but that, so stricken, the tree still lived and grew and bore, its good roots still holding securely in the earth. His face, already tender for his stricken woman, took an added softness and an added strength. So, he thought, a man knocked to the ground might hold with steadfast fibers to the foundations and nourishment of being, still grow and give. He knew the old tree well. He had climbed it and rifled it of its tasteless, rosy, scented apples often when a boy. He saw the veil of white and pink its blossoms scarfed upon the grass. He saw the little wild flowers blowing near it—the June wild flowers of Virginia, and he remembered. He saw love’s confession and its shyness come in a girl’s dark English eyes. He held her surrender and her dearness in his arms. He knew that he would remember this old apple-tree, its courage and its beauty, this _one_, selfsame apple-tree, in China and Virginia, with its rosy, hopeful, perfumed signal on the ground, its sturdy triumph of endurance and persistence in prostration, its dual message and its dual memory, the little wild flowers smiling at the ferns beside it; he saw in it a token and a commandment, and he knew that it would live with him while he lived and that living it would link—in his spirit—East and West. He laid his hand upon his wife’s. Ruby stirred to the touch and let him lift her to his arms. “It’s my head,” she told him, choking back her sobs. “It has ached all day”—as indeed it had. “I wish you hadn’t found me while I was so foolish.” “I am very glad I did,” he answered. “The pain made me cry,” she whispered brokenly. “I won’t cry any more.” Sên King-lo had never seen her cry before. But he only said quietly, as he soothed her hair, “Cry it out, dear.” But she was made a little of his own metal, and she laughed through her dwindling sobbing and dried her face upon his sleeve. He held her close, and she seemed glad to nest so. And they stayed together in the quiet, while a squirrel bounced softly back and looked them up and down. “It will be better soon now,” Ruby said presently. “It is better already.” “We must try to cure it soon, Ivy.” He had never called her that before. “Rest a little longer, sweetheart, then let me take you back and bathe it while you try to sleep. I cannot take a sick girl the long trail that is waiting for us, and I had hoped that we might start tomorrow.” “Start—” She dared not say the rest, but he felt the pulse leap in her wrist.