Next to the zashiki, or guest-room, around by the corner of the big plum-tree on which, now, great snowy pearls of buds opened with every hour, was the master's benkyo-beya, or study, where sets of Chinese and Japanese classics, often running into a hundred volumes, had snug place in fragrant cabinets of unvarnished cypress wood.

Contiguous to this, along the western side, and bounded ten feet farther by the fusuma of her parents' chamber, Yuki's little sleeping-room was tucked away. The stately garden, curving around by the plum-tree, spread here wider paths and less pretentious hillocks. Just in front of Yuki's shoji and the narrow veranda which ran unchecked along the south and west of the house, two sedate gray stones led into a gravelled space. Here were flower-beds somewhat in foreign fashion, but without bordering plants or bricks. Many of the small bushes were resultant from seed-packets mailed by Yuki in Washington. Imported pansies, alyssum, geraniums, marigolds, and ragged-robins grew here in springtime in friendly proximity to indigenous asters, columbine, pinks, and small ground-orchids. These flower spaces were now vacant but for tiny springing communities of chrysanthemum shoots, bare stems of peony with swollen red buds at the tip, and a few indispensable small pines. Beyond it all was the tall hedge of sa-sa shutting out the street, and its ugly inner rind of thorn.

The eastern side of the house contained, so to speak, its executive offices, dining-room, servants' quarters, pantry, kitchen, and well-shed. Along this portion (except by the kitchen, which stepped down unaided to a bare earth floor) strips of narrow veranda and convenient stepping-stones led into a vegetable garden, small wood-yard, and strawberry patch. The longest bit of veranda had the dignity of a rail,—a mere upright strip of board, edged heavily on top with bamboo, and pierced with openings cut into the shapes of swallows.

It was here, the morning after Yuki's arrival, that the women of the household were to be found. SuzumÈ chattered incessantly as she washed the breakfast-dishes and passed inward to arrange them on the pantry shelves. Little Maru San, a few feet away, out in the sunshine of the garden, scrubbed at pieces of a ripped-up kimono in a tub that stood high on its own three legs. Afterward she rinsed the bits and spread them smoothly to dry on a board. The tailless white cat, disdainfully satiate after a meal of tea, rice, and fish-bones, curled itself up in a fork of the bare persimmon-tree to sleep. Maru's favorite bantam cock, followed at a respectful distance by two wives and an unidentified black chick, sauntered along the kitchen drain, his yellow eye slanted for a swimming flake of white. The clear, windless air had a smell of new-washed leaves and of foreign violets. Yuki's heart stirred with the deep homeliness of it all. Iriya, noting her expression, asked brightly, "Is my dear one just a little happy to be at home?"

"No, mother, not a little happy, but very, very happy. It has been a long time."

Iriya was hanging out a bed-quilt of plaid silk, the squares three feet across and of superb coloring. "Yes," she repeated, "it has been a long time."

"Why did you let me go at all?" cried Yuki, passionately. "I was your only one. You must have missed me sorely. Sometimes I feel that I never should have gone."

"Hush, my jewel." Iriya gave an apprehensive glance toward the other side of the house. "Say not such words where the kind father may hear. He was so proud of you. It was his dearest wish, and Lord HaganÈ, our daimyo, advised it also. You see, we had no son, and Tetsujo was not willing to give me up that another wife might bring this hope to pass. He has been a good master to me, has Onda Tetsujo."

A glow of loving pride softened the regret that this thought of the son, that had not been given, always brought to her.

SuzumÈ looked up from her dish-tub, wrinkling with shrewd smiles. "You have no son—but what of it? Some day you will have a grand son-in-law, a young prince, maybe. Yuki-ko will make a marriage to bring glory to us all."

Yuki drooped her head. "I don't want to think of marriage yet. I just want to stay here in this precious home and try to win back some of those four long years which I have lost."

"But you are nineteen, Miss Yuki,—nearer twenty, in fact. A terrible age for a young lady of rank to be caught single."

"I wish it could be as you wish, my Yuki," sighed Iriya. "But, as SuzumÈ says, you are nearing twenty. I pray the gods that my son-in-law may not be of too exalted station to receive adoption into this family, instead of your being absorbed into his. That would be the greatest joy life holds for me. But, alas! I am a selfish, talkative old woman to let such thoughts escape. I should wish your marriage to be only that which may possibly serve your country and repay your father for his sacrifices."

Yuki lifted a small queer look. "In America, where my father sent me, I was taught, in the matter of marriage, to do some of the thinking myself."

Iriya caught her breath. SuzumÈ stopped washing to stare. Maru, looking up with her round mouth formed for a "Ma-a-a!" jostled the tub in her excitement. It went over with a "swash." The soapy water, with drifting islands of blue cloth, flowed out swiftly, carrying the pompous bantam and his family on the unexpected tide. The cat opened one green eye, then the other.

"Come, my child," said Iriya, quickly, to Yuki, "condescend to bear me company to the guest-chamber. I have the flowers to arrange. Perhaps, in America, you have learned some new and beautiful composition."

Yuki's queer look deepened into a naughty little laugh and shrug as she turned to obey. She knew perfectly why her mother wished to get her from the hearing of SuzumÈ and Maru. Tokio is not free from gossip, and, though SuzumÈ was devoted to the family she served, she dearly loved the start, the incredulity, the deepening interest of a listener's face.

To her mother's last suggestion Yuki replied, "I fear not, mother. The only idea of arrangement they have in America is to get many different flowers together, chop them to the same length of stem, and push them down evenly into a shapeless vase with other flowers painted on the sides."

"Ah," said Iriya, crestfallen and surprised, "we shall not then adopt the foreign arrangement."

The mother and daughter clasped hands, swinging them as children do, and moved along the narrow veranda. They were now skirting the closed shoji of the dining-room. In turning the corner, the plum-tree came into full sight. A hundred blossoms must have opened since the dawn. Yuki broke from her mother with a cry, ran to the tree, and threw her arms about the great trunk. "Oh, you are the most beautiful tree in the whole world!" she said aloud, and looked with adoration up into its shining branches.

As Iriya reached her, she lowered her gaze. "Do you remember, mother, that morning four years ago, when I went away, how I clung to this tree last of all, sobbing from my heart the poem that my father taught me?—

"I remember well," said Iriya, and drew her daughter's outstretched hand to her cheek.

Something shone suddenly in Yuki's eyes. "And I wept so passionately that father, half in tears himself, came and entreated me to cease. He said that if I shed more tears upon it, his tree, like that of MichizanÈ, might rise through the air and follow me to exile."

"Yes," smiled Iriya; "often have I recalled it in the time of spring, standing under this tree alone."

"It really did follow me after all, you know," the girl went on shyly. "It came at night, in dreams, when you and father could not miss it. Did it ever fail to return before the dawn?"

"No," returned Iriya, with deep gravity. "The dear tree loves us also. Never once did it fail to return."

Tetsujo strode toward them from his study. "How can one ponder on the classics, with pigeons cooing beneath his very eaves?"

Yuki clung to him. "You had the classics for four long years when I was away."

"So had I water through those four long years, small pigeon,—yet while I live must I thirst. The classics feed deep wells of the soul."

He put a strong, loving hand about her, and drew her near. It sprang into Yuki's mind to speak now of her foreign friends, to ask permission to visit them or, at least, to send them her Tokio address. Pierre's beautiful face and blue eyes reproached her. But this moment was too sweet for jeopardy. She pressed her cheek against the rough blue cotton of her father's shoulder. Iriya, stealing nearer, put also a loving arm about the girl. The sunshine made a halo for the three. The plum, loosening its first petals, sent them down in fragrant benediction.

So her day passed, a wonderful day, steeped in love and childish recollections. At night, the winds being chill, and the fear of robbers inherent in the Japanese mind, all shoji, and after them the wooden storm panels (amado), were tightly drawn. In the ashes of the great brass hibachi balls of charcoal glowed like incandescent apples. A lamp was suspended from the ceiling, swinging but a few feet above their heads. Here the four women of the household grouped themselves. Tetsujo had gone out for a call. The pieces of kimono, ripped and washed that morning by Maru San, were now to be refashioned. Iriya, SuzumÈ, and Maru drew forth little sewing-boxes and prepared for work. Yuki, half sitting, half lying on the floor, fondled the tailless cat, and declared boldly that she hated sewing and was not going to begin that part of a Japanese woman's drudgery quite so early.

"All good wives love sewing, particularly on the master's nightclothes," said SuzumÈ, reprovingly, and peering over the rim of huge horn spectacles toward the culprit.

"The o jo san will tell us something of foreign habits as we sew," suggested Iriya, the peacemaker.

"Yes—yes—I will be what is called over there the bureau of information," laughed wilful Yuki. "Any questions from you, Mr. Cat?" she cried, holding the drowsy animal high above her and smiling into its blinking eyes.—"Do American cats like rice?" "No." "Queer cats, you say,—and so they think of you." "Do they wear tails?" "Yes, long ones." "What do they use them for?" "For getting pinched in doors." "No more questions, Pussy San? Ah, you will never learn. Ruskin says that curiosity forms tendrils of the mind."

"What I would like to feel sure of, honorable young lady, is this," began SuzumÈ, primly, with a disapproving glance toward the cat.

"We are ready, Madame SuzumÈ, speak on," said Yuki, cuddling pussy back into her sleeve.

"Is it really true, as newspapers and pictures say, that women over there, even women of decent character, go to evening entertainments with no clothes above the waist, dance with red-faced men until they are on the verge of apoplexy, and then have to be restored by much fanning and a cold medicine called 'punch'?"

"Not altogether, good nurse," said Yuki, fighting hard to retain a semblance of gravity. "They wear cloth and flowers, feathers and jewelry above the waist, and arrange them with great beauty; but it is true that they dance with men, and that their shoulders and arms are bare."

"That is a strange custom," mused SuzumÈ. "Even our Sacred Empress condescends to go with bare arms. Why, I wonder, do they wish to expose arms more than legs? There is more leg, and in a supple young girl it is more shapely."

"That is too hard a thing for me," laughed Yuki. "Well, Maru, your eyes are big and solemn like the Owl San in our pine. What is your question?"

Maru, after much giggling and blushing, confessed to a desire to know, once for all, whether foreigners had toes like real people, or whether, as she had been assured from childhood, they possessed but a single horny hoof, which, from desire to hide the ugliness, they kept in pointed leather cases known as shoes.

"That is false entirely. I have seen hundreds of barefoot children in America, and they all had ten toes, even as we."

Maru seemed cast down. "Ma-a-a! what foolish tales are spread," she murmured. "Doubtless the foreigners have similar strange beliefs of us."

"It is what the great creatures eat that turns me sick," cried old SuzumÈ, and nearly perforated a finger in her vehemence. "Their soup is like the contents of a slop-bucket, with warm grease swimming on the top. The stuff would choke in a decent person's throat. And then the great heaps of animal flesh,—and greasy vegetables, and implements like gardener's tools to eat them with! And then—Kwannon preserve us—the unspeakable nightmares that come even after the tasting of such food!"

"ArÀ!" cried the maid, roused to new excitement by this recital of horror, "it is said that America is an honorably highly civilized country, and Nippon merely a divine half-civilized country, but I thank the gods who have given me to live in this half-civilized country."

At bedtime, Yuki, creeping between soft, fragrant futons, drew a deep sigh of childish content. The andon in the corner, shedding its gentle, paper-screened light, continued the impression of sunshine. The girl smiled to find herself again counting the lapped cedar boards of the ceiling, "Hitotsu—futatsu—mitsu—yotsu—" following them into uncertain dimness at the far end of the chamber. As in childhood she speculated upon the possibilities of that small black knot-hole left vacant in the wood. How much smaller now it was than four years ago! Still there was a chance, a pygmy probability, that a very small nedzumi might creep through, and, falling to the floor, scamper over mats and bedding, and—here came the shudder!—over the very face of a sleeper. She drew the bedclothes up spasmodically, then smiled to think how bright would be the eyes of the little mouse, twinkling in semi-darkness. In a moment more, with the smile still on her lips, she was asleep.

So a second day passed, and a third,—hushed, golden days, too precious to be imperilled. With the fourth morning, Sunday, came a change. In the night a storm had risen, sweeping down from Kamschatka along the Yezo coast to the wide unsheltered plain of Yedo. Here it wallowed like a great beast in a field, snorting with fury, crushing trees, fences, and houses, and fighting back the black clouds that would have crowded in upon it.

Through Yuki's troubled sleep came the sounds of vehicles rattling on foreign streets, and the blurred chime of church-bells. Her first conscious thought was, "It is Sunday. Gwendolen and I must be sure to go to service."

The wooden amado of the house chattered with fright. The wind gave long, derisive howls as it swept under the low-hanging roof, clutched and shook the rafters, and then darted out to the heart of the storm once more. Yuki realized slowly that she was not in America at all, that she was at home, in Tokio. With a slower, heavier recognition came the knowledge that her friend Gwendolen was here also, and if she were in Washington could not seem more remote.

She heard old SuzumÈ and Maru straining to open the amado, then Tetsujo's voice calling loudly from his chamber, "Keep them all shut on the eastern side!"

"Oh, my dear plum-tree! It will be torn like mist," said the girl aloud. She sat upright, patting instinctively the loops of her hair, dressed now in Japanese fashion. The floating wick of her andon fell over the edge of the saucer and went out, leaving the room in grayer darkness. The foreign clock that hung in the kitchen rang out the hour of seven. "What gloom! The storm must be terrible indeed!" A moment after the girl said, with a shudder, "This is the day on which I am to speak of my love. I hear his voice calling through the wind. I must wait no longer. Yes, I will speak to-day."

At breakfast the small family of three was silent and preoccupied. The one glimpse they had taken of the shivering, naked plum-tree would have sufficiently accounted for the depression. Iriya and Yuki sat a little behind the master, eating from their small rice-bowls, and attending in turn upon his wants. As SuzumÈ crept in to remove the half-emptied dishes, Yuki said to her father, "Father, a little later, when you have smoked and read your paper, may I speak with you?"

"Why, certainly, my child," said Tetsujo, kindly, looking up from the damp printed sheet he had already unfurled; "though I may have but few thoughts apart from this terrible storm."

"It is a terrible storm," shuddered Iriya. "A great camphor-tree in the Zen Temple garden has fallen. It was a goblin-tree, and the priests fear evil."

"I spoke not of the storm in the material universe, but of that vast political tempest brewing over us. Our minister leaves St. Petersburg to-morrow. War has practically come."

No comment was made. The three tacitly avoided, each, the glance of the other. Iriya rose quietly, then Yuki. In the door-frame the girl paused. "I shall return in half an hour, father."

Tetsujo nodded. "I shall be here."

In her own room Yuki moved about mechanically, putting into place her few indispensable possessions,—a silver brush, comb, and hand-glass, her white prayer-book and neat Bible, a picture of Gwendolen in a burnt-leather frame, and a lacquered box containing a second photograph, not of Gwendolen, and a package of letters, all addressed in the same hand. She fought to keep her imagination from the coming war. Its dark omen only strengthened her determination to have things understood. She prayed for strength and self-control. Punctual to the moment she entered the guest-room, bowing again to her father. He looked up from his brooding revery. Something in the girl's face made him ask, "Ah, have you indeed a matter of importance? My little Yuki has gone. This is a woman who comes to speak with me."

"Alas, father. Childhood, like the petals of the plum-tree, vanishes at the breath of storms."

"What storm can have found you so early, my little one?"

Yuki drew in a long breath, and steadied herself for a deliberate reply. In the pause Tetsujo leaned out, and with one motion of his powerful hand flung a panel of the shoji to one side, giving a view of the drenched and storm-tormented garden. On the veranda floor, usually so smooth, beaten plum-petals clung like bits of white leather. The drip from the low-tiled roof enclosed them in the bars of a silver cage.

"This is my distress, father," began Yuki. "I am a Japanese girl, with my first loyalty toward you and my native country;—yet, in that new land where you sent me,—I have come—I have grown honorably to feel, almost without warning, the—influence of a—person."

Tetsujo looked faintly surprised. "Indeed, I trust so, my child. You would be but a poor, unresponsive creature to have felt no influences. It is from such things that character and knowledge are builded. There were many persons who influenced you, I take it,—some for good, perhaps some for evil. To an intelligent mind a warning is valuable. Now, at home, you will have the leisure to sort and adapt such impressions, casting away those that are trivial and employing those which may be of service to Japan."

"It is augustly as you indicate, dear father," returned Yuki, the distress in her dark eyes deepening. "I attempted to observe many things. But the influence I spoke of is not that kind you are thinking. It—it—is a very special influence. In America they call it—love." She bowed her head over slightly. A faint pink tide of embarrassment showed on her forehead and in the small bared triangle of her throat.

Tetsujo controlled himself well. "You mean—love—'ai'—the love of a man and a woman who wish to marry?"

"In America one thinks very differently of such matters," said Yuki, her eyes still lowered. "Yet I suppose the feeling is honorably the same everywhere. Yes, father, it is of such love that I now must tell you."

"We have many Japanese terms for Love," mused Tetsujo. "Love of country, of Our Emperor, of parents, of beauty, of virtue,—but the term which you now employ should not be spoken by a samurai to a woman not his wife. You pay a high price for Western knowledge, my poor child, if already the dew-breath of modesty has dried from your young life."

"Father," she pleaded, "I am still a Japanese. I know how it must seem to you. I suffer in the speaking, but still I must speak. I promised. I must speak."

"You promised?" echoed Tetsujo, and looked more keenly into her shrinking face. "To whom could you have promised such a thing?"

"To him—that one—I first alluded to." She did not attempt now to meet his eyes, but fingered nervously along the edge of her sleeve.

"Can it be possible that in that country unmarried youths speak in unmannerly directness to young women of such intimate affairs? I had heard a hint of this unbelievable indelicacy, and once your mother, Iriya, hinted that we should warn you. But I scoffed then at the thought of your needing the admonition. Alas! being a woman, she knew you better than I."

His head sank forward. Yuki twisted her slim hands into wisps. "In America all speak of these things, father. They think us immodest for other reasons, and foolishly sensitive in this. The schoolgirls talk—and the matrons. All theatres treat of it—and books are full of it. You sent me no warning—I could not know, of myself. Please, honorably, restrain anger against me."

"I must not be angry," muttered Tetsujo, who now gave every symptom of a rising storm of wrath. "I must be calm. But gods! this is a foul spectre to meet at the very outset! Am I to understand that this man—this person—spoke directly to you, and you listened without first receiving permission from your parents? He could have gone, at least, to my friend, and my country's representative, Baron Kanrio."

"Father, father," cried the girl, "you are becoming angry. I did not have the time to reflect. In America one does things first and thinks about them afterward. I am not sure that person ever has even met—our noble baron."

If she hoped to palliate by this last disclosure she was quickly undeceived. "The gamester—the oaf! Insolent fool! An impostor unknown even by sight to your natural guardian in a distant land! He must be an alien! No Japanese—not even a Yedo scavenger—could have been guilty of that misdeed!"

"But he spoke quite openly to my best American friends, the Todds," said Yuki, desperately. Tetsujo's rising excitement and anger lapped like flames about this new thought.

"And that Mr. Todd, now come to be minister in our very home,—did he encourage your filial impiety?"

"It was not so much Mr. Todd as Madame, his wife, and my schoolmate, Gwendolen," admitted Yuki, with a sinking heart.

"Ah, I might have known it," said Tetsujo. His relief was evident. "Only women! Mere cackling geese. America echoes to their shrill voices. That is of no consequence."

"In that country women are of much consequence, and everyone speaks openly of affairs of love and—marriage," persisted Yuki, who now clung half hopelessly to this one tangible point.

"And you yourself—ingrate—would willingly bestow yourself, without a word from me or your mother, upon a man who is a stranger, and whose conduct, heard from your partial lips, impresses me as characteristic of a fool and an outcast?"

His brows were black and twitching. Yuki knew that she must take her stand now or never. "You see only the side of Japanese convention, father. I have given to him a promise. When your consent and that of my mother are gained, I shall be glad to be his wife."

Tetsujo started convulsively, then controlled himself. The sudden checking in of passion recoiled through the very air. With rigid hands he stuffed and lighted his small pipe. When he spoke his voice sounded flat and hollow, like beaten wood.

"Such a promise, unratified by me, of course means nothing, unless—it be defiance of heaven and of natural decency. It binds no one—you least of all. Consider it unsaid."

Yuki looked directly upon him. Her soft feminine chin grew a little squarer, more like his. "That promise is given, father. Neither you nor I have power to recall it. It has gained a living growth in the soul of a third person." She turned half-closed eyes to the garden. Tetsujo went forward in two small stiff jerks. His eyes fastened on her face, as though he saw it for the first time. Veins swelled in his neck, and the fingers on his small pipe-stem grew slowly flat, like the heads of adders.

"Is that you speaking, Onda Yuki?" he asked. "The gods grant that I wake from this dream! But if it be reality, then sorrow is to come. If this man be a foreigner, let him stay in his own land! You are mine utterly,—at my disposal in marriage as in all else. There are ways, in Japan, to curb such mad demons as those that now look at me through your eyes. Go! leave me. I shall hear no more of this,—or else it may be that I shall forget my fatherhood, as you your obligations. Go!"

"Father," said Yuki, quietly, "you must hear more of this or drive me from the house. You owe me consideration and justice; for the ideas that I have, you yourself sent me to America to gain. You even let me be a Christian. With the Christians marriage is a sacred thing—"

"Be still!" said Tetsujo, in a terrible, low voice. His pipe dropped to the floor. The coal burrowed itself, a charred and smoking ring, into the fragrant matting. The odor was that of field-grass burning. The man rocked himself to and fro for control. His lean hands plunged deep into his sleeves, and grasped, one each, a jerking arm. He was terrified at his own obsession of fury, and his soul warned him against a yielding to his madness. His greenish twisted lips writhed horribly once or twice before the next words came. One corner of his mouth went far down at the corner. His words hissed from a small distorted aperture near the chin. "You were allowed to turn Christian for the acquiring knowledge of their foolish—creed. I believed that the soul of a samurai's daughter,—of my daughter,—would be untainted by the immoral portions of their doctrine. I see now my credulity! Gods! I will consume myself with this heat! When you marry—wench,—which shall be soon,—if your Japanese husband approves not of Christianity, you will cease to be Christian!"

The two pairs of eyes met, hard, flashing, defiant. Yuki rose to her feet. He sprang after her. His right hand now felt instinctively for the sword-hilts which should have been at his hip. The leering, down-drawn mouth twitched and writhed.

"Your words do not lash from me my heritage of race!" she cried aloud. "I am still your daughter,—a samurai's daughter!" With a movement like light she stripped back her left sleeve, baring a white, blue-threaded arm. "Because I am a samurai's daughter I refuse a coward's obedience! Hot blood of a samurai stings these veins no less than those bronze arteries you clutch. Show me reason and I will listen. Apart from that I defy you! I shall be faithful to the man I love even though your legal rights prevent our happiness. Turn me into the street,—slay me with your own hand,—I shall not be compelled into a marriage of your choosing!"

Onda clutched his throat. The breath came gurgling like a liquid. For an instant it seemed as if he must hurl himself bodily upon her. Then he stumbled backward against the plaster wall of the room, clawing at its tinted surface. Yuki's eyes never left him. Now he lurched again toward her, then fell back, shaken like a jointed puppet by his own consuming rage. "Gods of my Ancestors! Demons of the deepest Hell! Go, go!—lest indeed I slay you. You fiend—you hannia! From my sight, I say!—I cannot endure—"

He cowered again, striking himself into temporary blindness with one powerful fist.

"I go, father, in obedience,—not in fear," said the girl's clear voice. He sprawled forward, and fell, sobbing like an exhausted runner. Yuki covered her face and went.