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Updated: July 1, 2025
The priest, in his tight trousers, and jacket, black and covered with a multitude of round flat buttons, stood up, and led the way into the house and down a long corridor to a closed door at the end. Dong-Yung hurried behind the two men. At the door the priest stood aside and held it open for her to pass in first. She hesitated. Foh-Kyung nodded.
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.
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.
"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.
Foh-Kyung and the black-robed priest walked past her, down the little aisle, to a shiny brass railing that went like a fence round before the altar. The foreign-born priest laid one hand on the railing as if to kneel down, but Foh-Kyung turned and beckoned with his chin to Dong-Yung to come. She obeyed at once. She was surprisingly unafraid.
The gate-keeper bowed, and slipped the coin, warm from Foh-Kyung's hand, into his ready pocket. "Walk beside me, little Wife of my Heart." Foh-Kyung stopped in the wide gravelled road and waited for Dong-Yung. Standing there in the sunlight, more vivid yet than the light itself, in his imperial yellow robes he was the end of life, nay, life itself, to Dong-Yung.
There was a tea-house, with a maiden playing a lute, and the words of the song, fantastic black ideographs, floated off to the ears of her lover. Foh-Kyung spread out its leaves in the sun, and looked at it and smiled." "Never is the heart of man satisfied," he said, "alone. Neither when the willow fuzz flies in the spring, or when the midnight snow silvers the palms.
"The willow-leaves will bud soon," answered Dong-Yung, glancing over her shoulder at the tapering, yellowing twigs of the ancient tree. "And the beech-blossoms," continued Foh-Kyung. "'The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." "The foreign devil's wisdom," answered Dong-Yung. "It is greater than ours, Dong-Yung; greater and lovelier.
In the corner of the kitchen stood a box of white pigskin with beaten brass clasps made like the outspread wings of a butterfly. Underneath the piles of satin she had hidden them, and the key to the butterfly clasps was safe in her belt-jacket. Dong-Yung stood in the kitchen door and watched Foh-Kyung. "Does my lord wish for anything?" Foh-Kyung turned, and saw her standing there in the doorway.
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.
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