But at quite an unexpected moment she became aware that Tzu Chüan was approaching her from behind. "Miss," she said, "you had better go and take your medicine! The hot water too has got cold."
"What do you, after all, mean by keeping on pressing me so?" inquired
Tai-yü. "Whether I have it or not, what's that to you?"
"Your cough," smiled Tzu Chüan, "has recently got a trifle better, and won't you again take your medicine? This is, it's true, the fifth moon, and the weather is hot, but you should, nevertheless, take good care of yourself a bit! Here you've been at this early hour of the morning standing for ever so long in this damp place; so you should go back and have some rest!"
This single hint recalled Tai-yü to her senses. She at length realised that her legs felt rather tired. After lingering about abstractedly for a long while, she quietly returned into the Hsiao Hsiang lodge, supporting herself on Tzu Chüan. As soon as they stepped inside the entrance of the court, her gaze was attracted by the confused shadows of the bamboos, which covered the ground, and the traces of moss, here thick, there thin, and she could not help recalling to mind those two lines of the passage in the Hsi Hsiang Chi:
"In that lone nook some one saunters about,
White dew coldly bespecks the verdant moss."
"Shuang Wen," she consequently secretly communed within herself, as she sighed, "had of course a poor fate; but she nevertheless had a widowed mother and a young brother; but in the unhappy destiny, to which I, Tai-yü, am at present doomed, I have neither a widowed mother nor a young brother."
At this point in her reflections, she was about to melt into another fit of crying, when of a sudden, the parrot under the verandah caught sight of Tai-yü approaching, and, with a shriek, he jumped down from his perch, and made her start with fright.
"Are you bent upon compassing your own death!" she exclaimed. "You've covered my head all over with dust again!"
The parrot flew back to his perch. "Hsüeh Yen," he kept on shouting, "quick, raise the portiere! Miss is come!"
Tai-yü stopped short and rapped on the frame with her hand. "Have his food and water been replenished?" she asked.