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"But who will negotiate for me and be the middleman? A man cannot go to a woman and say, 'Come to my house.' "

To this she answered instantly,

"Now do you leave this affair in my hands. Only tell me which woman it is and I will manage the affair."

Then Wang Lung answered unwillingly and timidly, for he had never spoken her name aloud before to anyone,

"It is the woman called Lotus."

It seemed to him that everyone must know and have heard of Lotus, forgetting how only a short two summers' moons before he had not known she lived. He was impatient, therefore, when his uncle's wife asked further,

"And where her home?"

"Now where," he answered with asperity, "where except in the great tea shop on the main street of the town?"

"The one called the House of Flowers?"

"And what other?" Wang Lung retorted.

She mused awhile, fingering her pursed lower lip, and she said at last,

"I do not know anyone there. I shall have to find a way. Who is the keeper of this woman?"

And when he told her it was Cuckoo, who had been slave in the great house, she laughed and said,

"Oh, that one? Is that what she did after the Old Lord died in her bed one night! Well, and it is what she would do."

Then she laughed again, a cackling "Heh---heh---heh---" and she said easily,

"That one! But it is a simple matter, indeed. Everything is plain. That one! From the beginning that one would do anything, even to making a mountain, if she could feel silver enough in her palm for it"

And Wang Lung, hearing this, felt his mouth suddenly dry and parched and his voice came from him in a whisper,

"Silver, then! Silver and gold! Anything to the very price of my land!"

THEN FROM a strange and contrary fever of love Wang Lung would not go again to the great tea house until the affair was arranged. To himself he said,

"And if she will not come to my house and be for me only, cut my throat and I will not go near her again."

But when he thought the words, "if she will not come," his heart stood still with fear, so that he continually ran to his uncle's wife saying,

"Now, lack of money shall not close the gate." And he said again, "Have you told Cuckoo that I have silver and gold for my will?" and he said, "Tell her she shall do no work of any kind in my house but she shall wear only silken garments and eat shark's fins if she will every day," until at last the fat woman grew impatient and cried out at him, rolling her eyes back and forth,

"Enough and enough! Am I a fool, or is this the first time I have managed a man and a maid? Leave me alone and I will do it. I have said everything many times."

Then there was nothing to do except to gnaw his fingers and to see the house suddenly as Lotus might see it and he hurried O-lan into this and that, sweeping and washing and moving tables and chairs, so that she, poor woman, grew more and more terror stricken for well she knew by now, although he said nothing, what was to come to her.

Now Wang Lung could not bear to sleep any more with O-lan and he said to himself that with two women in the house there must be more rooms and another court and there must be a place where he could go with his love and be separate. So while he waited for his uncle's wife to complete the matter, he called his laborers and commanded them to build another court to the house behind the middle room, and around the court three rooms, one large and two small on either side. And the laborers stared at him, but dared not reply and he would not tell them anything, but he superintended them himself, so that he need not talk with Ching even of what he did. And the men dug the earth from the fields and made the walls and beat them down, and Wang Lung sent to the town and bought tiles for the roof.

Then when the rooms were finished and the earth smoothed and beaten down for a floor, he had bricks bought and the men set them closely together and welded them with lime and there was a good brick floor to the three rooms for Lotus. And Wang Lung bought red cloth to hang at the doors