When Murong Feng heard her words, his feelings were so intricate and complicated that they were hard to explain. It was not as if he was happy, rather, it was a profound sense of loss. The room became silent. She was wearing two inch long pendant earrings made out of pink diamonds, and when they made small rustling sounds, he thought of when he was young and a few of the maids were playing with him in the atrium. During dusk on that summer day, they were gathering tuberoses, and carefully picked each flower – to avoid breaking it. They weaved the flowers into long pendant earrings as the maids were all in their teens, the age when they liked to play most. They hung the flowers on their ears, laughing and playing and then they called for him to look: “Sixth Young Master, Sixth Young Master…” That kind of flower had a faint fragrance, and his mother, who was standing on the steps, wearing a finely woven, wide-