In the third year of Tianshou there lived in Hengzhou a quiet man of Qinghe named Zhang Yi, who had taken office there and had few friends. He had no sons. He had had two daughters; the elder died young, and the younger, Qianniang, was lovely beyond compare.
Zhang Yi had a nephew from Taiyuan named Wang Zhou — clever as a boy, and handsome — and Zhang Yi thought highly of him and used to say, in front of everyone: “One day Qianniang shall be his wife.”
They grew up together in the same house, and each of them lay awake thinking of the other, and nobody in the family noticed.
Then a man came seeking a wife with the proper credentials, and Zhang Yi accepted him.
Qianniang was stricken. Wang Zhou was stricken worse. He told his uncle he had been posted to the capital and must go, and Zhang Yi could not dissuade him, and so gave him rich parting gifts. Wang Zhou, hating the world, went down to the river and took ship in the evening.
It was past midnight when he heard, on the bank, someone running.
He came on deck. It was Qianniang, barefoot, in her night clothes, calling his name through the dark.
“How did you—” he said, and then he stopped asking, for she was sobbing so hard she could not stand, and he had her aboard, and the boat was already moving.
“We are a long way from home before anyone notices,” she said. “Let us go, and never send word back.”
So they went. They travelled for years, and lived in Shu, and had two children, and Wang Zhou became a man of property, and neither of them wrote a line to Hengzhou, because Qianniang wept whenever the subject came up.
Until one year she said: “I have been a bad daughter. My father is old. Let us go home and let him see that I am alive and fed.”
Wang Zhou was terrified of being killed for it, but he loved her, and they took the road.
They came to Hengzhou. Wang Zhou went first, alone, to his uncle’s gate, and knelt before the old man and said: “Your daughter ran away with me. She is alive. She is outside. Punish me as you like, but see her first.”
Zhang Yi stared at him.
“What daughter?” he said.
“Qianniang.”
“Qianniang has been in that room for six years,” said her father, “on her bed, without speech, without food. I have had physicians from three provinces.”
Wang Zhou’s hands went cold. “Sir,” he said, “she is outside this gate. She has borne me two children.”
They went to the boat. And there was Qianniang — well, dressed, calm, and smiling at her father as though nothing had happened.
They brought her into the house. They went to the sick-room, where the other Qianniang lay on the bed with her face turned to the wall. And the one who had come from the boat walked to the bed, and lay down beside her, and — the tale says only this — the two became one body.
The girl on the bed got up. She was whole. She had been whole all along, and she had been away, and now she was home.
She wept, and her father wept, and Wang Zhou stood in the doorway doing neither, because he understood that he had been living for six years with a woman’s soul in the shape of her body, and that she had walked out of her own house barefoot to do it, and that this was, as far as anyone could tell, entirely ordinary.