Nagy N’Yang was sitting in the open doorway as I came up the path. I saw she had her chin in her hand and was thinking deeply. “I saw him,” I made answer to the question in her eyes. “Did he receive you well?” “Except that he did not have me to sit beside him on his big trader’s box in his hut, but took me to the doorway to talk. It was not friendly.” “Aha!” Just like that—soft, thoughtful. “But what do I care for him, with his Karen cloths or hammered brass?” I chattered at her. “Come to me, Sweet One of a Thousand Delights.” ―――― So the days and the evenings and nights went by, and the greater rains followed the lesser. The river crept up and up and up, roaring now to the cliffs, like old lions. Then came a day when on going home at eve I stooped at the river’s brim near the house we had on the rock spit, and felt of the water. It was chilled. “The flood is full,” I thought. I had felt the snow-chill from the Tibetan Himalayas in hoary Salwin’s yellow flood. When that comes, the utmost sources of the world have been tapped for flood water. “The river will begin to fall to-morrow,” I told Nagy N’Yang when I came into the place. “We will go soon after, when the big trading is over.” She smiled at me. Then she patted with her soft hand the place where she had tattooed on my brow the mark of the third eye of Siva. It was healed. “I care not where we go, or if we go or stay, so long as you are with me,” she whispered, close against my side. After the evening meal we sat in the doorway and heard the river talking. Often the big whirlpool sighed or moaned. “It will almost cover our rock spit,” I said. I knew by the lift of it by day and the noise of it by night that the flood was a mighty one and would spend its chief force that night. She nodded and nestled closer to me. Out of the shade before us a greater shade silently loomed. “I greet you, my sister and brother,” Pra Oom Bwaht said, standing before us. Nagy N’Yang shivered against my side. I felt the dagger under my robe. A single beam from our brazier inside struck across his twisty face. He stretched out his hand toward Nagy N’Yang. “A gift for my sister,” he said. She half reached her hand out, took it back, reached again and took it back; then, as if impelled by a force too strong to resist, reached again. Into her palm dropped something that shone for a tiny space in the yellow gleam of the brazier’s ray. She shut her hand—caught it to her breast. I thought it was a tiny golden bangle—then. “Come,” said Pra Oom Bwaht. “Let us walk apart for a moment. I have family matters to talk over. Your husband will permit.”