The two men got off the bus midway. Mrs. Yi watched them disappear on a barren slope.

As soon as Mrs. Yi got home, she shouted, “I saw Dr. Lin Baoguang!”

“Great! I always had a premonition that you would meet him,” her husband said.

“Before I had said very much, he said, ‘You already know.’ ”

“I thought that’s what would happen. Actually, you’ve been in touch with him for years.”

At dinner, Mrs. Yi talked about Wang’s tumor. Mr. Yi listened so attentively that he even forgot to eat. At last he sighed, “A miracle! If only I can do the same one day! It was a perfect time for him and the director to open this workshop.”

“If I had known about Wang when I was in the banyan forest, maybe I would have been calmer? Wang . . .”

“With the passage of time, you’ll be calmer and calmer,” Mr. Yi said with a smile.

Mrs. Yi smelled medicine, and asked her husband, “Are you taking precautions again? Are there signs of a new epidemic?”

“No, but we’d better be vigilant. Yun Village is growing, so there could easily be an outbreak of any kind of disease. Do you think that’s a good thing?”

“You already know the answer,” Mrs. Yi said.

They went to the back room to look at the prepared herbal decoctions. When the light came on, the decoctions danced in the glass bottles and made a beautiful sound.

“They can’t wait,” Mr. Yi whispered.

They immediately turned off the light and returned to the front room. She cleared the table and said, “You’re remarkable!”

That night, Mrs. Yi read an article in the medical journal that had recently arrived. This article didn’t seem to have anything to do with medicine. It was an ethereal argument on regional personality traits. Mrs. Yi was fascinated and involuntarily sighed, “Ah! Ah!” The writer’s pen name was “Guard.” Somehow, Mrs. Yi thought this article was very likely written by the girl Angelica in Blue Mountain. Mrs. Yi was sure—why so sure, she didn’t know—that the writer was describing a hero of the times, a woman who specialized in cultivating exotic plants. She couldn’t keep from shedding tears.

“Have you ever met Angelica?” she asked Mr. Yi.

“Yes, I met her today. She asked after you,” Mr. Yi said quietly.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you had seen each other. She said she had an appointment with you this afternoon at the lean-to.”

Mrs. Yi jumped up and said she had to go to the lean-to at once. Then, grabbing a flashlight, she rushed out.

No one was in the lean-to where the herbs were kept. She lay down on the wooden bed in the middle of the room. The herbs stirred softly, and their exotic fragrance enveloped her. Thinking of the director having slept in this very bed, Mrs. Yi couldn’t help becoming emotional.

Someone knocked on the door. It was Ginger.

“Has she been here?” Mrs. Yi asked.