“You are playing some pretty trick.  Let me talk to you a little.”

And she dragged her into an empty room.  The attendants who saw her asked each other why the girl was being dragged along like that.  But by this time the mother had locked the door.  When the attendants came and looked through the holes in the paper, they saw her lifting a stick, and heard her crying: 

“O wretch, tell me the truth, or I shall strike you!  Why were you weeping?”

At first Prudence thought of denial.  Then she said to herself that it would be better to confess and to beg her parents to break off her betrothal with the family of P’ei, so that they might marry her to Yu-lang.  If they refused, she would die.  That was all.  So she told the whole matter without evasion.

“We are husband and wife.  Our love is boundless, and our vows will endure for at least a hundred years.  My brother is recovered, and we fear that we shall be separated.  Yu-lang wishes to return to his parents, to send his sister in his place.  It seemed, then, to your daughter that a woman cannot have two husbands, and that if Yu-lang cannot marry me, I must die.”

As she listened to her, her mother’s breast opened with rage, and she stamped her feet:  “This rotten carrion has sent his son here and has deceived me.  And now my daughter is lost.  I must beat him unmercifully!”

She seized her stick, opened the door and ran forth.  Her daughter, forgetting her shame, tried to prevent her; but the old woman pushed her away violently, so that she fell down.  Prudence got up and ran after her.  The attendants also ran.

Now Yu-lang had very well understood that all was discovered when Liu’s wife had dragged her daughter away.  A moment later, the nurse hurried in.

“O my Gods!  And, ah unhappiness!  All is well lost!  Prudence is being questioned with the stick.”

It seemed to him that two knives were piercing his heart.  He burst out into sobbing.  But the nurse was already taking out his hair-pins and clothing him as a man.  In a state of stupor he let himself be hurried to the main door and through the streets.  A few moments later he was back at his parents’ house.

His father did not fail to say to him: 

“I told you to play the girl, not the man.  Why have you committed acts of which Celestial Reason disapproves?”

Yu-lang jostled thus by his father and his mother, no longer knew where he stood.  Meanwhile the nurse objected: 

“But what can they say there?  Our young Lord has only to keep himself hidden for a few days, and it will all pass over.”

But at Liu’s house the nurse, as she went away, had unwittingly locked the door, and Liu’s wife had come to it and was shaking it violently, stammering with rage and flourishing her stick.

“Thief, whom may Heaven strike dead!  O very vile rascal!  For what did you take me?  I am going to show you who I am!  I will have your life!  If you do not open the door, I shall break it open with a great case.”