“No.” Sên shook his head, as he struck her match. “You must not look at your last parting gift, given you after you had left the protection of the devil-screen. It will bring you bad luck for eleven moons, if you so much as peep, until your journey is over, until you are safe behind your own devil-screen of your own house door.”
“A devil-screen, in Kensington!” she tossed at him scornfully. “We haven’t got a devil-screen at our front door.”
“Oh—yes, we have.”
“What?” Ruby demanded.
“Love,” her husband told her.
“Yes,” she answered softly, “and we’ll trust it, outside as well as in. Cut those strings at once.”
When the rice-paper was pulled off it left a striped box of flat, gaily-colored straw, a box of tiny drawers which, when Ruby drew them out, showed each a saucer and a wee soft brush. Sên King-lo chuckled as he leaned over her shoulder. It was a paint-face outfit—white, carmine, rose and black, and a number of soft chamois “sop-rags” and “smooth-off cloths” all complete, that his cousin’s concubine had given his wife.
“There’s a hint,” he chaffed her.
“And here’s a poem!” Ruby exclaimed, pouncing on a slip of crimson paper lying unfolded on the little piles of chamois.
La-yuên could neither read nor write—the blind courtyard scribe must have made the characters of her message—but she knew that it was sin to deface, or even crease by folding, a printed, cut, or brushed word.