The woman eyed her compassionately.

“Your father, I know,” said she, as she unlocked a door and led her companion into a room opening on to the street, “has long wished for an excuse to set at naught your betrothal to Fou Wang; but I am sure the lad to whom you are both sun and moon will never give him one.”

She offered O’Yam some tea, but the girl pushed it aside. “You know not Fou Wang,” she replied, sadly yet proudly. “He will follow his conscience, though he lose the sun, the moon, and the whole world.”

A young woman thrust her head through the door.

“The mother of Fou Wang is dead,” cried she.

“SHE WAS A GOOD WOMAN—a kind and loving mother,” said Liuchi, as she gazed down upon the still features of her friend.

The young daughter of Ah So Nan burst into fresh weeping. Her pretty face was much swollen. Ah So Nan had been well loved by her children, and the falling tears were not merely waters of ceremony.

At the foot of the couch upon which the dead was laid, stood Fou Wang, his face stern and immovable, his eye solemn, yet luminous with a steadfast fire. Over his head was thrown a white cloth. From morn till eve had he stood thus, contemplating the serene countenance of his mother and vowing that nothing should be left undone which could be done to prove his filial affection and desire to comfort her spirit in the land to which it had flown. “Three years, O mother, will I give to thee and grief. Three years will I minister to thy three souls,” he vowed within himself, remembering how sacred to the dead woman were the customs and observances of her own country. They were also sacred to him. Living in America, in the midst of Americans and Americanized Chinese, the family of Fou Wang, with the exception of one, had clung tenaciously to the beliefs of their forefathers.

“All the living must die, and dying, return to the ground. The limbs and the flesh moulder away below, and hidden away, become the earth of the fields; but the spirit issues forth and is displayed on high in a condition of glorious brightness,” quoted a yellow-robed priest, swinging an incense burner before a small candle-lighted altar.

It was midnight when the mourning friends of the family of Fou Wang left the chief mourner alone with his dead mother.

His sister, Fin Fan, and the girl who was his betrothed wife brushed his garments as they passed him by. The latter timidly touched his hand—an involuntary act of sympathy—but if he were conscious of that sympathy, he paid no heed to it, and his gaze never wavered from the face of the dead.

II

“MY GIRL, MOY DING FONG is ready if Fou Wang is not, and you must marry this year. I have sworn you shall.”

Kien Lung walked out of the room with a determined step. He was an Americanized Chinese and had little regard for what he derided as “the antiquated customs of China,” save when it was to his interest to follow them. He was also a widower desirous of marrying again, but undesirous of having two women of like years, one his wife, the other his daughter, under the same roof-tree.