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The cook lifted off the wooden lid of the rice-kettle, and Dong-Yung scooped up a dipperful of the snow-white kernels. On the tiny shelf before each god, the father and mother god of the household, Dong-Yung placed her offering.
She looked back, down the wide gravelled way, through the gate, where the gate-keeper sat, tipped back against the wall on his stool, to the shop of the money-changer's opposite. A boy leaned half across the polished wood counter and shook his fist in the face of the money-changer. "Thou thief!" he cried. "Give me my two cash!" Dong-Yung was reassured.
Before her, the light streamed into the little chapel through one luminous window of coloured glass above the altar. It lay all over the grey-tiled floor in roses and sunflowers of pink and god. A deep purple stripe fell across the head of the black-robed priest. Dong-Yung was glad of that.
They smell sweet as the breath of heaven itself." Dong-Yung smiled as the flower-girl stuck one of the fragrant, fragile, green-striped orchids in her hair, and hung two others, caught on delicate loops of wire, on the jade studs of her jacket, buttoned on the right shoulder. "Ah, you are beautiful-come-death!" said the flower-girl. "Great happiness be thine!"
It had been smiling and pleased before at the sight of the faint, white lily-petals and the sunlight on her feet and the fragrance of the orchids in her hair; but now it was lit with an inner radiance. "My beloved Master!" Dong-Yung made a little instinctive gesture toward the approaching man, which in a second was caught and curbed by Chinese etiquette.
Foh-Kyung stood in the doorway. "My lord," stammered Dong-Yung, "I did not understand your meaning." "I know that, little Flower in my House. The new meaning is hard to understand. I, too, am but a blind child unused to the touch of the road. But the kitchen gods matter no more; we pray to a spirit."
The lilies bloomed that day. Out in the courtyard in their fantastic green-dragoned pots, one by one the tiny, ethereal petals opened. Dong-Yung went rapturously among them, stooping low to inhale their faint fragrance. The square courtyard, guarded on three sides by the wings of the house, facing the windowless blank wall on the fourth, was mottled with sunlight.
"See, I take her hand," he said to the priest, "even as you would take the hand of your wife, proud and unashamed in the presence of your God. Even as your love is, so shall ours be. Where the thoughts of my heart lead, the heart of my small wife follows. Give us your blessing." Foh-Kyung drew Dong-Yung to her knees beside him.
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.
"Come, we will go hand in hand, thou and I, even as the men and women of the Jesus thinking; not as Chinese, I before, and thou six paces behind. Their God loves men and women alike." "Is it permitted to a small wife to worship the foreign-born God?" Dong-Yung lifted her eyes to the face of Foh-Kyung. "Teach me, O my Lord Master! My understanding is but young and fearful "
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