The viceroy found him standing quietly by the river, turning from the slowly dying fire out there to the slowly spreading glow in the eastern sky.
“I like to think,” remarked his excellency, smiling in friendly fashion, “that when the first Buddhist patriarch, Bodhidharma, miraculously crossed the river on a reed plucked from the southern bank, it was not far from here, near my home.”
“Was not your city of Huang Chau the home of Li To?” asked Doane.
“Indeed, yes!” cried his excellency. “In some of his excursions on the river he undoubtedly passed the site of my home.”
Doane quoted from that most famous of rhapsodists in musical Chinese: “'One who has hearkened to the waters roaring down from the heights of Lung, and faint voices from the land of Ch'in; one who has listened to the cries of monkeys on the shores of the Yangtze Kiang and the songs of the land of Pa'.... That”—he was musing aloud, reflectively as the Chinese do—“was written three full centuries before William of Normandy first set foot on British soil.... Li Po so described himself.”
They talked on, of life and philosophy, in, language interwoven with classical allusions. Friendship, the finest relationship in Chinese civilization, as it stood, had come to them.... It brought a kind of peace. Doane failed to recognize this sensation as in some degree but a phase of his painful exaltation. It seemed to him then that his struggle, no matter what atonement might lie before, was over. He forgot again the Western vigor that was, and to the last would be, driving his spirit.
Meanwhile the swiftly growing acquaintanceship of Huj Fei and Rocky Kane was weaving its bright-tinted weft in and out through the dark warp of Rocky's ill-spent youth. His eyes followed the slightest movement of her slim hands and rested dog-like on her finely modeled head about which the shining wet black hair lay close. To his quick youth she was an exquisite fairy. He felt her as perfume in the air he breathed. Her voice, when she drowsily, prettily spoke, fell on his ear like music in an enchanted land. He could say little; he had never before so lost himself.
She tried daintily to conceal a yawn. And he, clasping the child in both arms, turned away to hide its brother. Then, very softly, she laughed and he laughed.
“You must try to sleep,” he said gently.
“I can no' let you keep my sister. You, too, are ver' tire'.”