Cheng Fa, a man of Fuliang, worked for hire and was constantly back and forth between the Jiang and the Zhe country.
In the ninth month of the fourteenth year of the Chunxi era, coming home from Lin’an and crossing the borders of Qian county, he met a woman on the road in the clear early morning. Her face was haggard with trouble.
“I am unlucky,” she said to him. “My husband is a cruel man and I am always being beaten; and his mother is fiercer still. I have not had one settled day. Last night they turned me out of the house and I have nowhere to put myself. If you will take me with you, I will marry you.”
“I have a wife of my own,” said Cheng, “and she looks after my mother. How am I to put her aside for nothing and marry somebody else? And if we two travel together, everyone on the road will call us fornicators and thieves. Nothing good will come of it.”
“Then go on ahead,” said the woman. “I know this road very well. I will come and find you at your lodging this evening.”
Cheng had no argument left, and answered carelessly: “Very well.” And he went on alone.
At dusk he came to the inn, and the woman was already in his room.
She pressed him to lie with her. At first he would not. Then she said angrily: “I will go straight to the headman and tell him you carried me off and forced me.”
Cheng was very much afraid. And he saw that she was better-looking than his wife. So he did as she asked.
Towards dawn she said: “I shall have to come to your house eventually. If you are afraid your wife will not have me, take another room somewhere nearby, and I can come to you there from time to time.”
At parting she took a padded coat out of a handkerchief and gave it to him.
When Cheng got home he said nothing of it to his mother or his wife. There was a market called Guangping five li from where they lived, fifteen li from the county town, and Cheng went there every day.
Then he was taken ill, and for the first time he told his mother what he had been seeing. “That woman came into the room just now to ask how I was,” he said. “She sat on the bed for a while and then went out of the door.”
His mother was aghast. There was nothing there at all.
He died at daybreak. His mother dressed him in the padded coat and buried him in it.
His wife afterwards married again. She had borne one daughter. When the daughter married, Cheng’s mother went to live with her, and the room was left empty.
