When the rice-paper was pulled off it left a striped box of flat, gaily-colored straw, a box of tiny drawers which, when Ruby drew them out, showed each a saucer and a wee soft brush. Sên King-lo chuckled as he leaned over her shoulder. It was a paint-face outfit—white, carmine, rose and black, and a number of soft chamois “sop-rags” and “smooth-off cloths” all complete, that his cousin’s concubine had given his wife. “There’s a hint,” he chaffed her. “And here’s a poem!” Ruby exclaimed, pouncing on a slip of crimson paper lying unfolded on the little piles of chamois. La-yuên could neither read nor write—the blind courtyard scribe must have made the characters of her message—but she knew that it was sin to deface, or even crease by folding, a printed, cut, or brushed word. “Poem! More like a sermon!” Lo laughed as he took it from her. “Read it to me,” Mrs. Sên commanded. “ ‘Make thy face a garden of roses and lilies and find favor in thy honorable lord’s eyes,’ ” Lo translated carefully. “Now you know!” Ivy took the crimson letter from him with a quiet smile and put it back. “Open the other one,” she ordered. “You are a fearless woman,” Sên King-lo asserted as he obeyed. Then he shouted joyfully. La-yuên had sent his English wife a Chinese “back-scratcher,” but not such as you can buy any day in State Street in Chicago, or in Museum and Hart Streets in London: “scratchers” quite genuine in their not patrician way and useful enough, if you chance to need them; but sometimes their tiny hands are imitation ivory, and their long black handle-stems made of painted wood. This tiny palm was of perfect, finest ivory as exquisitely molded and as perfect as Ruby’s own hand; each wee knuckle flashed an embedded jewel, very small but very good; and the sharpness of the minute finger-nails was considerately smooth. The long handle was of “green-moonlight” jade: an exquisite, costly toy, despite the raw suggestion of its useful purpose: an implement of self-indulgence fit to rasp discomfort even from the person of a red-button mandarin. And from the “chop” carved in the jade of the long handle, King-lo made little doubt that in other days it had done so; but he kept that surmise to himself. CHAPTER LII Ruby smiled in her sleep that night, lying in her tent, dreaming pleasantly and kindly of a Chinese concubine who had been loath to say “goodbye.” At dawn King-lo left her still sleeping happily and went quietly out of their tent. He turned back on their route and retraced his own steps of the day before. On a hillock not far from the tent his wife was in but standing back on their road of travel, nearer, if only a few rods nearer, to the homestead he had left—forever—he stood and looked back towards where the red roofs lay that he could not see—that he would not see again. His face was very calm, but its gaiety had gone. No need to wear a mask now! This was his last turning back.