The fragrance of a blossoming plum-tree stole across from a
Chinese courtyard, and a peach-branch waved pink in the air. A wonder of
contentment filled Dong-Yung.
All the while Foh-Kyung was talking. Dong-Yung turned back from all the
greenness around her to listen. He sat very still, with his hands hid in
his sleeves. The wave-ridged hem of his robe--blue and green and purple
and red and yellow--was spread out decorously above his feet. Dong-Yung
looked and looked at him, so still and motionless and so gorgeously
arrayed. She looked from his feet, long, slim, in black satin slippers,
and close-fitting white muslin socks, to the feet of the foreign priest.
His feet were huge, ugly black things. From his feet Dong-Yung's eyes
crept up to his face, over his priestly black clothes, rimmed with stiff
white at wrist and throat. Yes, his face was even as the face of a
priest, of one who serves between the gods and men, a face of seeing
eyes and a rigid mouth. Dong-Yung shuddered.
"And so we have come, even as the foreign-born God tells us, a man and
his wife, to believe the Jesus way."
Foh-Kyung spoke in a low voice, but his face smiled. Dong-Yung smiled,
too, at his open, triumphant declarations. She said over his words to
herself, under her breath, so that she would remember them surely when
she wanted to call them back to whisper to her heart in the dark of some
night. "We two, a man and his wife"--only dimly, with the heart of a
little child, did Dong-Yung understand and follow Foh-Kyung; but the
throb of her heart answered the hidden light in his eyes.
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