“—for home, dear,” he finished for her. “It is time we went.” She made no answer. She could not trust her voice, and she was trying desperately to keep some of the joy from her face. “Are you not rested a little?” Lo asked her before long. “Shall we go, slowly, now?” “Quite rested—and very much ashamed,” Ruby told him. Sên lifted her and led her beside him, with his arm about her shoulder. When they saw the red roofs in the distance, the red up-curling roofs of his birthplace, Ruby drew away from him and faced him. “Lo,” she asked, “are you sure that you are ready? Is there any hurry? Lo—tell me—do you want to go?” “Want to go!” Sên mocked her, laughing down at her, and his eyes laughed with his lips, “want to go _home_—and to Ruben!” And his wife believed him. It was the first lie Sên King-lo had ever told her. CHAPTER LI If they had given her courteous welcome, they gave her kindliest parting. They gave her many words, and she understood the kindness of their tones. And they gave her many gifts. Sên Ya Tin gave her jewels and a jeweled lute, a silver box of sweetmeats, her own face, painted before King-lo had been born, and a cape of peacocks’ feathers. The women gave her silks and embroidered crêpes and opal-tinseled gauze. Her husband’s kinsmen gave her ivories and jades, and the toddlers gave her flowers and splint-baskets of persimmons and lychees, and one gave her its favorite doll. Sên Ya Tin gave them pleasant, tranquil speeding—at the outer door this time—and there was no hardness in her eyes. And Sên King-lo went as he had come, with his hand on his wife’s litter, smiling lips and cheerful, happy eyes. The red roofs of the homestead were dimming in the distance when a veiled and shrouded woman slipped from among the trees, and held out a tiny yellow hand to stay them. At a gesture from lord Sên King-lo the bearers waited, and La-yuên came closer, throwing off her dark merino veiling as she did so. She held out to Mrs. Sên a long and slender parcel and another that was cube-shaped and not large, each swathed in rice paper that glistened silky in the daylight and each tied criss-cross and securely by thin, red cord-string. Ruby took what La-yuên offered; but before she could frame words of thanks, or King-lo improvise them for her, the girl had shaken her clasped hands at Sên Ruby, made the k’o-tow of subservience to the lord Sên King-lo, and darted like a tottering lap-wing back towards the homestead through the shelter of the forest. But they both had seen that as she turned and sped away her eyes had filled with tears. For the concubine had loved Sên Ruby and was loath to have her go. “Ought she to have come?” his wife asked anxiously. “Will she get in trouble for having left the courtyard?”