Foh-Kyung drew Dong-Yung to her knees beside him.  His face was hidden, after the manner of the foreign worshipers; but hers was uplifted, her eyes gazing at the glass with the colours of many flowers and the shapes of men and angels.  She was happier than she had ever been—­happier even than when she had first worshiped the ancestral tablets with her lord and master, happier even than at the feast of the dead, when they laid their food offerings on the shaven grave-mounds.  She felt closer to Foh-Kyung than in all her life before.

She waited.  The silence grew and grew till in the heart of it something ominous took the place of its all-pervading peace.  Foh-Kyung lifted his face from his hands and rose to his feet.  Dong-Yung turned, still kneeling, to scan his eyes.  The black-robed priest stood off and looked at them with horror.  Surely it was horror!  Never had Dong-Yung really liked him.  Slowly she rose, and stood beside and a little behind Foh-Kyung.  He had not blessed them.  Faintly, from beyond the walls of the Christian chapel came the beating of drums.  Devil-drums they were.  Dong-Yung half smiled at the long-known familiar sound.

“Your small wife?” said the priest.  “Have you another wife?”

“Assuredly,” Foh-Kyung answered.  “All men have a great wife first; but this, my small wife, is the wife of my heart.  Together we have come to seek and find the Jesus way.”

The priest wiped his hand across his face.  Dong-Yung saw that it was wet with tiny round balls of sweat.  His mouth had suddenly become one thin red line, but in his eyes lay pain.

“Impossible,” he said.  His voice was quite different now, and sounded like bits of metal falling on stone.  “No man can enter the church while living in sin with a woman other than his lawful wife.  If your desire is real, put her away.”

With instant response, Foh-Kyung made a stately bow.  “Alas!  I have made a grievous mistake.  The responsibility will be on my body.  I thought all were welcome.  We go.  Later on, perhaps, we may meet again.”

The priest spoke hurriedly.

“I do not understand your meaning.  Is this belief of such light weight that you will toss it away for a sinful woman?  Put her away, and come and believe.”  But Foh-Kyung did not hear his words.  As he turned away, Dong-Yung followed close behind her lord and master, only half comprehending, yet filled with a great fear.  They went out again into the sunshine, out across the flat green grass, under the iron gateway, back into the Land of the Flowery Kingdom.  Foh-Kyung did not speak until he put Dong-Yung in the rickshaw.

“Little Wife of my Heart,” he said, “stop at the jeweller’s and buy thee new ear-rings, these ear-rings of the sky-blue stone and sea-tears, and have thy hair dressed and thy gowns perfumed, and place the two red circles on the smile of thy cheeks.  To-night we will feast.  Hast thou forgotten that to-night is the Feast of the Lanterns, when all good Buddhists rejoice?”