"She too," pondered Pao-yue, "must have been bent upon writing verses, or
supplying some line or other, and at the sight now of the flowers, the
idea must have suggested itself to her mind. Or it may very likely be
that having spontaneously devised a couplet, she got suddenly elated and
began, for fear it should slip from her memory, to trace it on the
ground so as to tone the rhythm. Yet there's no saying. Let me see,
however, what she's going to write next."

While cogitating, he looked once more. Lo, the girl was still tracing.
But tracing up or tracing down, it was ever the character "Ch'iang."
When he gazed again, it was still the self-same Ch'iang.

The one inside the fence fell, in fact, from an early stage, into a
foolish mood, and no sooner was one 'Ch'iang,' finished than she started
with another; so that she had already written several tens of them. The
one outside gazed and gazed, until he unwittingly also got into the same
foolish mood. Intent with his eyes upon following the movements of the
pin, in his mind, he communed thus with his own thoughts: "This girl
must, for a certainty, have something to say, or some unspeakable
momentous secret that she goes on like this. But if outwardly she
behaves in this wise, who knows what anguish she mayn't suffer at heart?
And yet, with a frame to all appearances so very delicate, how could she
ever resist much inward anxiety! Woe is me that I'm unable to transfer
some part of her burden on to my own shoulders!"

In midsummer, cloudy and bright weather are uncertain. A few specks of
clouds suffice to bring about rain. Of a sudden, a cold blast swept by,
and tossed about by the wind fell a shower of rain. Pao-yue perceived
that the water trickling down the girl's head saturated her gauze attire
in no time. "It's pouring," Pao-yue debated within himself, "and how can