Then the end came suddenly in a short spasm of suffering. When it was over Kuei Ping could not feel that Fuh Tang was finished with life, but that he had passed on where there was no more of earthly suffering.
The long days that followed bore their pain of loneliness. The sleeves of his garments hung so empty and lay so still as she folded them away. Bo Te cried piteously for the return of his father. Stilling his cries and lulling to sleep the little daughter, Kuei Ping felt herself to blame that she had wanted freedom and perhaps had bought it with Fuh Tang’s life. Then there came over her a great thankfulness for what he had given her--the right to come and go as she chose through the compound door, two children to guide in their wanderings beyond it, and a love that seemed nearer now than it had since those days when the weariness had first begun to come upon him.
Her days were different from those of the women whose homes joined hers along the hutung only in that she had greater personal freedom and that she sought to live by the pattern of the life of Christ. The duties were the same round of daily household tasks. Time and time again she found it hard to live as near like the Master in kindliness and love as the women whom she knew who still worshipped in the old familiar ways. But as her daughter grew older she was tenfold thankful for the little she had learned of Christian faith and of the place it gave to women.
While Kuei Ping’s children were small she taught them, gathering about her each morning, as her uncle had done before her, all the children of the compound. She followed in her lesson plans the same teaching of nature from the plants in the garden, the same beginning of five written characters from the old classics each day, but to the worn book of Rites she added the parables from the book of Christ. A dream grew then,--to found a home school in which all the children of the neighborhood who would, might come and learn not the western way of life, but the home way enlightened by the teachings of Jesus.
Almost miraculously she and her little village passed untouched through the Boxer rebellion. Perhaps it was their smallness that saved them from the destroying hand of the fanatically-crazed men who sought to save their country as the center of the universe, complete in itself, and to drive out all other influences. Kuei Ping likes to think of it as a modern miracle.