The stranger said they ought to have arrived hours ago, and then they bid me good-bye, and I waited once more. I was uncomfortable now—I was no longer afraid. At least not till it grew dark, and then, I must confess, the place seemed to me strangely eerie. The sun was set, the moon was old, and not due till the morning, the faint wind moaned through the pine-branches, and the darkness was full of all sorts of strange, mysterious, unexplainable sounds. It was cold, cold, and the morning and the light were a good eleven hours off.
Then, just as I was in the depths of despair, there was a commotion in the courtyard, a lantern flashed on the trunks of the pine-trees, and a kindly American voice out of the darkness said:
“I thought I had better come down and see if your outfit had turned up.”
“There is not a sign of it.” I wonder if there was relief in my voice.
“No, so the people here tell me, and they are in rather a way about you.”
So that was why the dirty old gentleman had apparently been stalking me. It had never occurred to me that these people could be troubled about me, this was a new and kindly light on Chinese character.
“Perhaps you'll come along with me,” went on my new friend. “I've got two ladies staying with me from Tientsin, and they'll do the best they can for you for the night.”
Bless him, bless him, I could have hugged him. Go, of course I went thankfully, and with his lantern, he guided me over the steepest and roughest of mountain paths till we came to his temple, a much bigger one than mine.
“I thought there was no one left in the hills,” I said as we went along.
“I'm going next week,” he said, “but I love this valley. There is only one lovelier in the world—the one I was born in.”