Page:Chinese Fairy Tales (H. Giles, 1920).djvu/41

he dug up and carried away with him. Hwang now knew that the white girl was a flower spirit, and became very sad in consequence of what had happened. Later on, he heard that the peony had only lived a few days after being taken away, at which he wept bitterly; and going to the hole from which it had been dug up, he watered the ground with his tears. While he was weeping over this loss he suddenly saw the young lady of the red clothes standing beside him, and wiping away her tears. "Alas!" she said, "that my dear sister should be thus torn away from me; but the tears, sir, which you have shed may perhaps be the means of restoring her to us." That night he dreamt that the red girl came to him again and said that she also was in trouble, begging him to try to rescue her. In the morning he found that a new house was to be built close by, and that the builder, finding a beautiful red camellia in his way, had given orders that it should be cut down. Hwang managed to prevent the destruction of the flower; and the same evening the red girl came to thank him, this time accompanied by her white sister. The red girl explained that the Flower-God, touched by Hwang's tears, had allowed the white girl to come back to life. At this, Hwang greatly rejoiced, but when he grasped the white girl's hand, his fingers seemed to go right through it, and to close only on themselves, not as in the days gone by. The white girl said to him, "When I was a flower spirit, I had a body; but now I am no longer a real person, only a kind of ghost as seen in a dream, though I still have my home in the white peony, beside the red camellia, my sister." Hwang, however, was