Later Su-ling came out to me and sat down to talk. It was strange: she made no mention at all of what had happened the previous afternoon. I kept expecting her to reproach me, but she spoke to me in her usual way, as a teacher, and soon the sad, fearful night-thoughts that had troubled me after my vision of the dam and my brush with the head tracker vanished. Su-ling seemed more charming than she ever had to me, for the thick air of the morning hung a veil between us, a delicate gauze of moisture which seemed to smooth her hair and mollify her bright sharp eyes. She was, as she had always been toward me, amiable—wanting to teach and please; she told me stories of the mist, which is forever personified, in the lore of the Great River, as a lovely woman, a seductive princess, a girl of uncommon beauty and warmth. Where, in these poetic stories, were the vagueness, the hazard, the chill, the marrow-dampness of the fog that was actually around us, through which that solitary junk had rushed with its demonic crescendo and fading away a few minutes before?

Soon the head tracker joined us, and, to my very great surprise, he seemed casual and friendly. His manners were very good; he seemed kindly toward me. Su-ling still addressed herself to me, and much of the time Old Pebble just sat and listened, really something of an outsider in our conversation. He intruded only to suspend footnotes from Su-ling’s tales, and when he spoke, with his curious rhythmic gestures and metronomic clicks of the tongue, he seemed to be trying to improve my entertainment.

Perhaps I should have thought it was queer that he had no apparent reaction to what had happened the day before. Perhaps I should have searched his face for the too-shrewd look I had seen there on other occasions when he had lied or teased or mocked. Su-ling had soothed me; I thought the whole affair of the previous day had blown over.

For some reason, perhaps because of the rise in the level of the river during the night, one of the long bamboo spars that braced the junk offshore, while hawsers and spring lines held the craft securely in place, came loose from its footing on a rock and fell into the water. The purchase of this spar against the junk had been well aft, and so our talk on the conning deck was interrupted by a rush of crewmen to re-establish the fallen pole. As I stood and watched, Su-ling and the head tracker stayed close on either side of me; we were much jostled by the overactive repairmen.

Presently the mooring had been reset, and we three took up again our pleasant talk. Again I felt as if I were a kind of honored guest, and I was complacent.