The Chancellor went straight into the yamen, took his seat in the main hall, and asked the lady to come out and meet him.

Two readings of 相 in a single line again: 丞相 takes xiàng, the office, and 相見 takes xiāng, the mutual one, to see each other. He sits down in the main hall and sends for his daughter as though this were an ordinary call, and everything difficult about the scene is packed into that formality.

The lady wished to go out, but ashamed to face her father, was about to hang herself.

羞, ashamed — and the word is doing precise work, because this is shame and not guilt. She did nothing she chose. 自縊, to hang oneself: she starts for the door, cannot face her father, and turns to the rope instead.

Xuanzang, learning of it, rushed to save his mother, fell to both knees, and said to her:

急急, the character for urgent doubled: at a run. 雙膝跪下, down on both knees. The boy who has spent this chapter being carried, hidden and handed along is now the one doing the rescuing, and it is the second time in two days that he has saved a woman in his family from what grief was doing to her.

'I came with troops at my grandfather's side to avenge my father.'

外公, the outer grandfather — his mother's father, marked with 外 for the same reason the old man called him an 外孫, an outer grandson, two passages ago. He calls himself simply 兒, your child.

'Today the villain is taken — why, mother, would you instead seek death?'

反 is the hinge of the sentence: on the contrary, the opposite of what ought to follow. The villain is caught, so why today of all days? 尋死, to go looking for death.

'If you die, mother, how can your child live on?'

豈 asks a question that expects no for an answer, and the closing 乎 marks the sentence as formal, almost literary. He is eighteen, on the floor, reaching for the classical, formal phrasing his mother would recognise from her father's house. And the argument is the only one available that could work: not that she is blameless, but that her son needs her alive.

The Chancellor also came into the yamen to console her.

勸解 is two verbs at once — to urge, and to loosen. To talk somebody down. 丞相, 相 = xiàng.

The lady said, 'I have heard that "a woman follows one husband to the end."'

婦人從一而終, a woman follows one man to the end, is the classical formula she is measuring herself against and failing. It comes out of the ritual books, and by the Ming it had hardened into something close to enforceable: a widow who refused to remarry could be honoured with a memorial arch paid for by the state. In 從一而終 the 一 takes the falling tone yì, the shift it makes automatically before any syllable that is not itself falling.

'Grieving that my husband was slain by the villain, how could I brazenly give myself to him?'

靦顏 is to wear a face with no shame on it; the character 靦 is about the face and what it gives away. And 從賊, to follow a bandit, uses the very verb 從 that the maxim used one line earlier. Follow one husband to the end, or follow a bandit. She is prosecuting herself with her own quotation.

'Only because I carried an unborn child did I swallow shame and live on.'

遺腹 is a precise term: a child still in the womb when its father died. 忍恥偷生, swallow the shame and steal a life — 偷生, to live on by theft, is what the language gives a person who believes they should have died instead. And here, finally, is the answer to the question the reader has carried since the riverbank. She stayed for him.

'Now happily my son is grown, and I have seen my old father raise troops for revenge;'

長大, grown up, takes 長 as zhǎng, to grow — not the cháng, long, of 長安. This is also the terrible arithmetic of the scene: both of her reasons to stay alive have now been discharged.

'but as a daughter, with what face can I meet you?'

面目, face and eyes, is the word for the self you can show other people, and 有何面目, what face have I left, is still ordinary Chinese for a disgrace you cannot come back from. 為女兒者, one who is a daughter, takes 為 as wéi; 相見 takes the reciprocal 相 as xiāng.

'There is only a single death, to requite my husband.'

報 here is to repay, the same verb as in 報仇, repaying a wrong, which every other person in this scene has been using about Liu Hong. She turns it on herself and makes her own death the payment.

The Chancellor said, 'This is not my child changing her virtue with fortune's rise and fall;'

節 is the length of bamboo between two joints, and by extension the part of a person that does not bend: integrity, and for a woman specifically her fidelity. 改節, to change it, is the charge she has just brought against herself. Her father's defence is that she never traded it for circumstances — 盛衰, flourishing and decline, fortune going up and coming down. 丞相, 相 = xiàng.

'it all came of utter necessity — how can it be a disgrace?'

不得已, unable to stop, is the standard phrase for having no choice, and it is still the ordinary way to say it. His entire argument rests on those three characters: an act done under compulsion is not the act of the person compelled. 何得為恥, how can that be a shame, takes 為 as wéi.

Father and daughter embraced and wept, and Xuanzang too grieved without end.

父子 here means parent and child rather than father and son — the child is his daughter — and 子 keeps its full reading zǐ. 相抱, holding one another, takes the reciprocal 相 as xiāng. 哀哀 is grief doubled, which is what the language does when one of a thing is not enough.