Here the fairy lover is offered and refused. Four pilgrims on a long road are received into a rich house where "a lady of charming appearance" tells them she is a widow with "three daughters, Truth, Love, and Pity by name" and then proposes marriage — herself to one traveller, a daughter to each of the rest. The daughters are "ladies of surpassing beauty"; the lands, granaries, and herds are past counting, and the whole temptation is spread out like a feast.

The Master, Hsüan Chuang — the pilgrim-monk who leads them — "sat as if listening to frogs after rain, unmoved" by the offer, until "the lady retired in a rage". But Pa-chieh, the pig-natured companion, slips round to accept. Blindfolded in a marriage-game, he gropes after brides he cannot hold — "like fairy forms they fluttered about him" — and, made to try on a jewelled waistcoat that tightens into rope, he is caught fast; "the curtain of enchantment fell", the beauties and their palace vanish, and the travellers wake on bare ground in a cypress-grove with Pa-chieh bound to a tree. The fairy bride was a snare from the first.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this liaison its number, gathered eight authorities beneath it — Irish, Scotch, Icelandic, Indian and more. Only this Chinese witness, in the 1922 compilation Myths & Legends of China, reaches served text; the rest wait unread. When the fairy lover comes not to bless but to test, is refusing her a loss — or the only way out?