quite unfamiliar to him, that she was no menial, and that she looked
like one of the twelve singing maids, who were getting up the plays. He
could not, however, make out what _roles_ she filled: scholars,
girls, old men, women, or buffoons. Pao-yue quickly put out his tongue
and stopped his mouth with his hand. "How fortunate," he inwardly
soliloquised, "that I didn't make any reckless remark! It was all
because of my inconsiderate talk on the last two occasions, that P'in
Erh got angry with me, and that Pao-ch'ai felt hurt. And had I now given
them offence also, I would have been in a still more awkward fix!"

While wrapt in these thoughts, he felt much annoyance at not being able
to recognise who she was. But on further minute inspection, he noticed
that this maiden, with contracted eyebrows, as beautiful as the hills in
spring, frowning eyes as clear as the streams in autumn, a face, with
transparent skin, and a slim waist, was elegant and beautiful and almost
the very image of Lin Tai-yue. Pao-yue could not, from the very first,
make up his mind to wrench himself away. But as he stood gazing at her
in a doltish mood, he realised that, although she was tracing on the
ground with the gold hair-pin, she was not digging a hole to bury
flowers in, but was merely delineating characters on the surface of the
soil. Pao-yue's eyes followed the hair-pin from first to last, as it went
up and as it came down. He watched each dash, each dot and each hook. He
counted the strokes. They numbered eighteen. He himself then set to work
and sketched with his finger on the palm of his hand, the lines, in
their various directions, and in the order they had been traced a few
minutes back, so as to endeavour to guess what the character was. On
completing the sketch, he discovered, the moment he came to reflect,
that it was the character "Ch'iang," in the combination, 'Ch'iang Wei,'
representing cinnamon roses.