As dusk deepened, a woman in black wearing a lightly veiled hat leaned against the railing of the first-floor corridor.
Her shoulders trembled slightly, her face lowered beneath the gauze. Her hands gripped the railing tightly, loosening and tightening with the voices drifting down from the second floor.
Qu Yong's drunken words floated through the upstairs window crack, one sentence after another. Those "unavoidable hardships," those "things beyond my control," those "so few mornings and evenings together"-every word was a tiny needle, cruelly and precisely piercing the softest part of her heart.
At last, she could not help turning her head aside. Beneath the corridor's dim yellow light, tears streaked her face, her wet lashes clung together, and the tip of her nose was red. She bit her lip, desperately stifling her sobs, but her shoulders would not stop shaking.
On this evening when water and sky blended into one, Yun Ying was only a floor away from the man she yearned for day and night. She could hear his breathing, could hear his indistinct, dreamlike murmurs. The words seemed spoken in a dream, broken and barely audible, yet they shattered her heart into pieces.
She lowered her head and wiped her face with her sleeve, then quickly let the gauze fall and turned toward the corridor's exit, stepping softly as though afraid of disturbing him.
Only when she reached the entrance of the Pine Crane Tower did she fail to resist looking back at that upstairs window, where a little warm light seeped through. She paused, then hurried into the noisy bustle at the mouth of the alley, like a drop of water falling into a great lake, vanishing in an instant.
Night gradually deepened. The lights of Pingjiang Prefecture went out one by one, leaving only the night-watch