Throughout the months of March and early April this strange hiatus in war bulletins hung, like a gray sky, above national enthusiasm. The more dignified of the newspapers still adjured the populace to patience, still exhorted them to have faith in their wise and careful leaders. "The Hawk's Eye," on the other hand, bereft of inflammatory battle themes, served up, with new condiment of ingenious suggestion, the personal gossip of the hour. Few of the weekly issues (those printed entirely in English) omitted a guarded slur upon the conjugal felicity of the HaganÈ household. Gwendolen came in for her share of veiled allusion. Yuki-ko, each week stung by the contemptible malice of the attack, promised herself that never again should the paper be opened in her home. Gwendolen, at the American Legation, weekly did the same. The results of both resolutions were equally humiliating.

This was not a happy time for Gwendolen, creature of sunshine and spring breezes as she seemed. The continued strained relations between herself and Dodge interfered quite seriously at times with the young man's official duties. Mr. Todd leaned more heavily than he knew upon his attachÉ's four past years of experience in Tokio life, and resented an attitude of one of his own family, which kept Dodge so rigidly within the paling of mere officialdom. Mrs. Todd, who had never professed great friendship for the secretary, now most loudly denounced his "outrageous flirtation" with the Spanish girl, and even declared it an affront upon her Legation. Gwendolen, urged one moment to stop the affair, "as she certainly could by the lifting of a finger," was, the instant after, taunted by her inability to do so.

The public friendship between Dodge and the charming SeÑorita deepened obviously with each day. Hints of an early marriage flecked "The Hawk's Eye." Mrs. Todd began to feel herself personally injured by her wilful daughter. Finally, goaded into action and spurred by her own restless heart, the girl made a counter-move of a sudden and desperate intimacy with Carmen herself. Such things are not unknown in the history of adolescence. Carmen yielded to the American's bright fascination with the caressing languor characteristic of her. The two girls lunched together, dined, drove, and had tea together, and spoke of each other in exaggerated terms of endearment. Dodge, whatever his private surmises, retained an unaltered front. Naturally he and Gwendolen were more often together. She showed to him an air of cherished hostility, varied by small lightning-flashes of appeal. Two feminine currents blew full upon him. Dodge kept his hat on. The beautiful Castilian bore toward him the attitude of an indulgent conqueror. Gwendolen aided this, and whenever possible threw Dodge into the position of Carmen's accepted lover. Also, for some reason known only to herself, she encouraged the Spanish girl in her belief in Dodge's overwhelming adoration.

Gwendolen soon discovered that her new friend had an uncontrollable yearning for "dulces," and eagerly embraced this opportunity for demonstrating her new affection. Gwendolen scoured the alleys of old Yedo for novel sweetmeats; she purveyed from the French shops of Yokohama imported dainties; she sent a telegraphic order to a certain New York confectioner. Carmen appreciated and devoured all results. The Japanese confections, which many other European ladies might (without, of course, having tasted) pretend to despise, she declared delicious. The "ama-natto," or small purple bean, boiled and sugar-coated with lilac frosting, she called "fairy marron." Mikan, or small oranges preserved whole, with a flake of cinnamon and ginger, gained an established place on the Spanish Legation table. "Hakka ame," that delicious triangle of peppermint cream, improved from an American missionary's original recipe, vied in public favor, as a hors-d'oeuvre with French bonbons, salted almonds, and olives.

Once Carmen's French maid, suspecting, perhaps, more than a purely altruistic intention in Gwendolen's persistent offerings, warned her young mistress against immoderate indulgence in sweet foods, and protested, with many gesticulations and a hint of tears, that the very last importation of Paris gowns already needed the letting out of seams, and would soon be unwearable. "Nonsense, Lizette," smiled the pampered one, "not eat dulces? I have always eaten dulces. How, in the Virgin's name, would one get through a novel without a plate of dulces beside it?"

The maid sent a hostile glance to Gwendolen, which the blonde beauty had the conscience not to resent. Rapidly increasing embonpoint was Carmen's one menace to beauty. She had already begun to pray to her patron saint for diminution. On the prie-dieu invariably lay a half-nibbled chocolate. Were not Gwendolen's friendship so open, so obvious, one might have suspected that she connived with fate to circumvent her Carmen's petition; that actually she assisted in the mournful process of burying perfect features and luscious, languorous dark eyes in warm cushions of pink fat. But no, we must not think such things of Gwendolen.

Because of the new intimacy and an increasing activity in Tokio society Gwendolen now saw much less of her schoolmate, Yuki. Perhaps it was as well. The Princess HaganÈ had her own lessons to learn, and they were Japanese lessons. Following close upon her first sewing-meeting came Yuki's presentation to Their Majesties. The court ladies welcomed her into their midst. As in humbler Japanese circles she was immediately asked innumerable questions. In return she began learning, from her high-born interrogants, the new language of extreme court ceremony.

Another reception and another sewing-meeting fell due. To the latter of these functions a mere handful of foreign ladies came. Gwendolen and Mrs. Todd were detained, actually, by some globe-trotting Washington associates, who landed that very day at Yokohama. In the two subsequent gatherings foreign attendance ceased altogether.

Each reception was, however, a "crush." Gossip is a magnet; the presence of eligible young men not exactly detraction. Mrs. Stunt and others of her kind went openly to see whether Pierre Le Beau would attend, and how he would conduct himself before host and hostess. It was the secret craving of such social vultures that a scene, the more disgraceful the better, be enacted for their entertainment, and the disappointment was correspondingly keen when neither Pierre nor Count Ronsard attended. The count, indeed, sent cards and a gift of flowers. No mention at all was made of the younger man.

Three of the HaganÈ official functions had taken place. March hurled itself gruffly into the outstretched arms of spring. Gwendolen knew why Pierre stayed away and why Ronsard remained so impassive. She had good reasons for not telling Yuki. At her friend's silence the latter wondered. Instinct told her that there was a deeper explanation than mere forgetfulness. More than once she had nerved herself to inquire; but always, just on the point of asking, something had happened to interfere.

A new cry, which affected Yuki far more openly, began to ring through the current press. "If complications have arisen in Manchuria let Prince HaganÈ go and unravel them!" This demand grew in insistence with each day. Presently the whole nation had arisen, and was clamoring, "Send our War Lord, HaganÈ, to the front!" Yuki waited patiently for her husband to inform her of the reception of this demand in high quarters. Like a good Japanese wife she dared not force the issue. On every side her part, it seemed, was to wait, to command herself, to endure suspense. To an impatient nature such as Gwendolen this would have been torture. To Yuki, trained through centuries of brave ancestors to play her woman's part of uncomplaining quiescence, the strain was not so great. Her ignorance of Pierre seemed, indeed, the heaviest burden. She scanned now the English columns of every paper, hoping against hope that her eyes would seize the printed assurance of his return to France. This was the young wife's prayer, uttered on her knees each night, muttered through pale lips a hundred times each day, that Pierre would go quietly home, and in his own dear land forget the woman who had broken faith with him. His threat against HaganÈ's life did not sound to her absurd. It re-echoed to her, always with a pang of fear. Love and hate alike give preternatural insight. By injury to Prince HaganÈ alone could Pierre gain full revenge. By this means he could strip the flesh from the bones of her loyal sacrifice, laying bare the grinning skeleton of a national disaster, wreaked through her.

Of course she could not speak these fears to HaganÈ. There was no one, not even Gwendolen, to whom she could whisper them. HaganÈ was now seldom at his home. She gathered, once or twice, from gossip of the servants, that he had spent the previous night and day at the Tabata villa, with a small company of statesmen as his guests. In the infrequent visits, she, studying his face with unconscious intensity, saw the same power, the same sadness, the invincible strength unshadowed and unexcited by this renewal of popular hero-worship. The thought that he might leave her alone, to fulfil the duties of his position, brought to the young wife a pang of terror, of misgiving. She believed it to be merely a shrinking from heavy responsibility. To outward appearance she and HaganÈ stood on opposite shores of an increasing chasm; but in her heart, when she dared listen to its timid pleadings, she knew it to be a narrowing, not a widening, void their joint lives spanned. She could not doubt that he felt some grave pleasure in seeing her on his expected visits to the great shell of his official home. The weekly receptions, where she bore herself with ever-increasing dignity and poise, did indeed give to the husband a deep impersonal satisfaction. It was more than satisfaction that he felt, as he saw the great filled packing-cases sent away each week to suffering soldiers in Manchuria.

Once, coming in upon her unannounced, as was his custom, he had suddenly taken the white thing in his arms, thrown her head back to his shoulder, and gazed into her eyes as though to drag from some hidden depth an awakening thought,—a cradled possibility. Yuki's lids drooped under the blinding force of his look. She felt as though a great silent wind blew, pinning her against a rock. Surely in his twitching face was more than a calm self-congratulation! It was the man, the master, summoning by right what was rightly his. Love—strong, terrible, yet tender, showed for an instant in his dark eyes. He went from her as quickly as he had come. No word had broken the silence. During the rest of that day Yuki rocked in her heart a new-born hope, a possibility so strange, so ineffable that she dared not open her eyes to its tiny face. With bowed head and fast-closed lids she hushed it. That day set her feet on the temple-stair of shining prophecy. But how dare she, already to one pledge so faithless, climb upward, even on bleeding knees, to that splendid portico above?

April spread her witchery of green and flowers over a thousand barren hills. Wild azaleas, wigelia, and bokÈ (pyrus Japonica) barred the slopes with pink and crimson radiance. Valleys, so lately brown, spread now a wide bloom of violets, a curdled residue of purple morning mists. Earth-dwarfs, congeners of Loki, who people the under-world, drove upward from their subterranean caves huge copper spikes of young bamboo—ten inches across, some of it, as it pierced the mould—a marvellous springing column climbing by joints, two feet a day, toward the sun, and casting off brown sheaths, like outgrown jackets. Children roamed the hedges, the rice-field dykes, and copses (forgotten and unbuilded, sometimes in the very heart of Yedo) for tsukushimbo and the yellow chrysanthemum. All gardens, even those amorphous products of Eurasian uncertainty surrounding the American Legation and Yuki's official home, needed to be fair. Birds came to them, and early butterflies. The sun poured down upon them in equal measure his golden cataracts of joy.

Saturday of the first week came. Pierre Le Beau had not been mentioned to the Princess HaganÈ, nor had she found a printed notice of him containing a hint of information. Cleverly insulated wires of venom, it is true, attached to her name and HaganÈ's. Sometimes Pierre was subtly referred to, but never openly. Next day, thought Yuki, she would go to church. Perhaps something would be said of him by the ladies who always crowded so eagerly about her carriage door. This weekly service, in the Episcopal church at Tsukijii, formed now the closest tie that bound Yuki to her Western memories. It was anticipated with eagerness. This link, at least, she told herself should not be snapped. HaganÈ's consent that she continue openly her Christian devotions had been unqualified.

The mail that Saturday morning proved unusually large. An American mail-ship was in. Several letters and papers came from trans-Pacific friends, a great many Tokio social invitations, a few notes relating to Red Cross matters, and one folded pamphlet with a Japanese postmark. She knew from its pink wrapping that it was "The Weekly Hawk's Eye." With a slight shudder she put the evil thing aside, with a vague reawakening of the intention to burn it unopened. Slowly she read her letters and invitations. She glanced through the few American papers for any blue markings. All were finished. She leaned to gather them up and have them taken to her private desk upstairs, when the sun, pointing one bright finger through a blind, fell upon the pink wrapper and rested on her name. "Princess SanÈtomo HaganÈ." It looked very cheerful and suggestive. The dull pink of the cheap paper glowed into a rosy hue. Perhaps it was an omen. Perhaps if she were brave and opened the sheet boldly she would find, instead of the usual malicious innuendoes, the announcement that Pierre was leaving for France. Thinking of HaganÈ's eyes as they had probed her own she flushed, trembled a little, and murmured aloud, "Oh, if he would only go—if Pierre would only go—how happy—" She broke off. A wave of compunction, pity for Pierre, scorn of her own fickleness, rushed upon her. She took the paper hastily, set her lips for what might be in store, and opened at random.

Her name was plain enough, and Prince HaganÈ's. This time headlines had been dared. "Prince HaganÈ soon to leave his young wife. The Nation demands his presence at the centre of martial differences. HaganÈ loath to leave his young wife. Who knows what may happen? M. Le Beau raving in delirium at the German hospital in Yokohama."

So much she read and paused. Very quietly she folded the paper and slipped it within a gray silk sleeve. She stooped for the crumpled pink wrapping, smoothed it also, and dropped it in her sleeve. Next she gathered into a neat package the mail she had been reading, rang for a maid-servant, and sent the mail up to her boudoir. Her orders were given in the usual low, pleasant voice. In closing, she said, "Should visitors come I am to be found in this room."

Again alone, she walked to a western window and stared out at the great square shadow of the house thrown across the awkward garden. Beyond the straight line of the shadow, paths shone brilliantly in the sun, and flowers danced. Spring had come a little early. Everything that had a blossom to show rushed, it would seem, to the perfumed exhibition.

Yuki shivered slightly. For the first time she knew that her hands were growing cold. She moved slowly toward the fireplace, an ordinary foreign grate with coal fire burning. Nearer the warmth she drew out again the pamphlet, unfolded and deliberately read the article from the first word to the last. Some passages she dwelt upon, extracting to its full flavor the bitterness of frustrated hope.

According to the "Hawk's Eye" correspondent, Pierre had caught germs of malignant malaria, perhaps of typhus, while wandering in a state of great mental agony along the moats that border a certain official dwelling. He was now at the crisis of his malady. Two nurses watched him night and day, for his dementia had made of him a cunning schemer, full of sly efforts to escape. When detained he raved fearfully, saying that he had "things to do." "The Hawk's Eye" ingenuously marvelled as to what these "things" could possibly be. As is usual with articles so inspired the suggestions were far more damaging than any actual statement.

She let her hands fall limp. One still clasped the ugly journal. Only a few moments before she had accused herself of heartlessness toward one she had wronged. In her generosity she had almost demanded a deeper suffering, if only it could be directed personally to her offending self, and not include, in its consequences, that great man whose name she now bore. Well, here was her punishment,—a fetid, scalding stream of venom, hurled full and straight at her. Attacks like this were, she knew, less to HaganÈ than the mud children throw against the base of a lofty statue. His mind moved in a stratum far above such contamination. The nation spoke direct to him. His ear was for his Emperor, the old gods of his race. "Yes," thought the young wife, "I wished to suffer for the wrong I have done, but these writhings of a polluted personality can scarcely be dignified by the name of suffering. It is as if one went forth bravely to combat a knight in armor and encountered a filthy swine. One cannot retaliate upon a beast. Nor,"—here, with a nervous transition to energy, she tore out the offending page,—"nor can I, being his wife, attempt punishment for this defilement." The sound of tearing paper soothed her. One by one she snatched the sheets, crumpling them loosely, and threw each in turn upon the coals, where it twisted, opened its angles, caught in a little puff of smoke, and burned quickly. A sound came to the front door. Some one opened it. She gathered the remaining pages, rolled them hastily into a pithy sphere, and tossed the whole mass to the grate. A soft explosion of smoke and brightness followed. Red light fawned upward to the slender gray figure and excited face. A door of the drawing-room opened, and the draught pulled out from the grate before her a long, pliant tongue of flame. She felt HaganÈ catch her backward. "That is a risk, to burn papers in these great, ill-constructed chimneys, my little one," he said. Yuki clung to him, staring up into his face to try to judge whether he had already seen the offensive article. He had an unusual animation. She even fancied that his voice shook; but it was not the excitement of anger or disgust. Some national crisis had come. His next words proved the truth of this supposition. "I wish you not cremated this day of all days," he smiled, trying, as she could see, to speak with some lightness. "I need my wife. An opportunity for service has come, more important than all that has gone before. Are you ready, my Princess?"

"Lord, I live but to serve you and my land."

"We are in a national crisis, Yuki," said her husband. He began to walk up and down the long room with an abandonment to agitation which she had not seen in him before. "A crisis," he repeated. "I shall not explain the matter of it. You need not have the weight and burden of such knowledge, but you can aid me greatly." He paused now near a window. Yuki followed. "I await your pleasure, Lord," she said.

He turned to her the deep magnetic gaze she dreaded, yet, strangely enough, longed, at times, to provoke. One massive hand leaned on her shoulder. She had no impulse now to shrink from him. She longed to cower against the strong defence of him, to hide in his breast, in his sleeves, as the frightened souls of little dead children hide in the sleeves of Jizo Sama. As though understanding the unspoken longing he drew her very near. His words were still impersonal. "Some terrible, hidden things long suspected have come to light. I do not believe the wrong past mending. The first step in restitution comes to-day. It is a secret meeting here, in this house,—a small gathering of statesmen, but it may mean to us defeat or victory."

"Yes, Lord, I listen. A meeting at this house."

"It must appear to be a casual assembling. No servant, not even the good Tora, is to be trusted. When I have given you full instructions I return at once to the palace. Should any unforeseen chance call me back before the hour of one, I charge you speak no words into my ear, nor seek to deflect my thoughts from their ominous course. I bear a heavy burden, Yuki. But the Gods will aid me in my strength."

"I will not honorably accost or fret you, Lord."

"The statesmen,—and here are the written initials of their names,"—he drew a small scrap of paper from his sleeve—"these seven statesmen, including Sir Charles Grubb and Mr. Todd, will be ushered as usual into these drawing-rooms. If no other guests be present, say to these men in turn, after the first salutations, these exact words: 'I have received from my lord instructions and the initials of your name.' Can you repeat precisely?"

Yuki did so.

"That is well. Thirteen words, remember. They make to these seven a sort of password. Each, as you speak, is to be conducted to my small office-room to which the wooden doors, and the heavy portiÈres also, are to be drawn."

"I understand, your Highness. But what am I to do if other visitors come?"

"Ah, little Princess HaganÈ, it is in such straits that your experience of foreign social hypocrisy must be made to serve you. It is of imperative need that you do not leave this room after the hour of the Rat (1 p. m.). Yet it is also imperative that you receive, equally, all guests. Those unbidden you must get from the house."

"It is a difficult task, Lord, but it may be done."

"That is a brave wife. Remember that not only from the time of the Rat, but this hour, too, this very moment, commences your vigilance. Tale-bearers and enemies may be lurking near. If human ingenuity can keep a meeting secret this will be kept, but, alas, in a time of great issues the dragon's teeth sow spies instead of men. Do you understand all I have said, my Yuki?"

"I understand, your Highness, and am honored to do your august bidding." Before leaving her he gazed for another moment steadily into her upraised face. "You are pale to-day as your name, my small snow-wife; yet your eyes move and glitter with a strange unrest."

"I beseech your Highness concern not your weighty thoughts with my unimportant outer appearance."

"I must not do so, indeed," murmured her husband. "My chief thought now must be my Imperial Master. Farewell, little one. I shall arrive at one, if not before."

Yuki followed him to the door for a last wifely obeisance. The carriage had been waiting for some moments. After the loud rattling of wheels came a hollow silence. Yuki stood on the granite doorsteps looking outward with unseeing eyes. The house-shadow shrank closer to the huge cube that cast it. Sunshine, like a golden fluid, brimmed up the azure walls of day. From garden-beds nearby, and from path-borders leading into hazy distance, blossoms beckoned. She saw only an iridescent blur. The jinchokÈ (called by foreigners Daphen Odora) rose in waxen masses of white or arbutus pink. Azaleas heaped formless hillocks with Tyrian hues, and the long yellow sprays of yama-buki, to which Gwendolen had so often been compared, poised waiting for the breeze, or else tossed in bright indignation at the sudden desertion of a bird. Sweet odors flowed inward, and whispered her to follow. Still half unconsciously she stepped down to the gravelled path and began to walk in the garden.

Sometimes, among the beautiful familiar blooms, an alien flower smiled, a budding rose-tree, or a purple blotch of English violets. The thought of Pierre's danger came now with less of acid pain. Perhaps this illness was to save them both—and HaganÈ. The long hospital days might bring to the young Frenchman clearer judgment, and perhaps a more forgiving heart. In convalescence, surely, he would wish to return to his own land. At such times the spirit is fain to leave the weak body, and speed on before, to childhood's home. She had reached a cluster of the early iris. These were Pierre's flowers, the lilies of his France. She stroked the silken petals as though they were hands. "Pierre, my poor, poor Pierre," she breathed aloud.

"My Yuki-ko," came as an echo.

Yuki started and looked around in fear. "Little flowers, was it you that spoke my name?"

"Yuki," came the low voice again. "Do you grieve for Pierre? Poor Pierre is dead!" He stepped out from behind a cluster of dark cypress-trees. Yuki bit her lips to keep from screaming. Was this the ghost of the man she had loved?

"Yuki," said the phantom, with a little chill whine in his voice, "won't you even speak to me?"

"Is it you, Pierre, or is it indeed your newly fled spirit come to reproach me?"

Pierre ran his hands through his short, dry hair, then dropped them, as if the effort had been too great. He took a step forward. "Why, yes, it is Pierre, after all. I thought I was dead, but I am not. Yes, sweetheart, you may come to me. It is your Pierre."

Yuki ran to him and caught one dangling hand. It burned her like hot metal. "You escaped, in spite of your two nurses?" she cried.

Pierre began to whimper. "Yes, yes, Yuki, I got away at last. I had things to do. Don't send me back there, Yuki! My room has bars, like a cage."

"How did you get away?"

"Little Jap nurse couldn't resist me. Told me of a back entry. Nice little nurse in white cap. Jap—cap; cap—Jap. Ha—ha!"

"Come, dear," said Yuki, pulling him gently. "I will not send you back. You shall go with me to the little Cha no yu rooms at the far end of this garden. There you can lie down until you feel better. Will you follow me quickly and in silence along this little path?" She pointed.

"Indeed I will—no need to ask twice," cried the sick man, and began to giggle like an excited child. "I'd follow you anywhere, Yuki. Are we running away to be married?"

"Hush, Pierre; if you laugh and speak so loud others will hear you and send you back to prison. We must be very, very quiet."

"Very quiet," echoed Pierre, solemnly. "Never do for old prince to hear us, oh, no!" He began to mince along on the tips of his toes, giggling every now and then at the thought of the trick they were playing.

Yuki sped on before him, like a fawn. At the tea-rooms she sprang to the narrow, railless veranda, drawing a single shoji panel carefully to one side. The two small rooms were in order. Sunken into the floor of one was the copper hibachi, two feet square and now filled with cold ashes, an article indispensable to tea-rooms of ceremony. The sun pouring against translucent paper walls flooded the small space with radiance.

"What dear little rooms!" exclaimed Pierre, as he scrambled in, panting. "She would call them 'cunning little rooms,' that yellow-haired American girl. What was her name, Yuki? She is not a good friend to poor Pierre; she could not swear it when I asked her. Are these the little rooms where we are to live, Yuki, now that we have run away from the old prince and are married?"

"Yes, dear," said Yuki, soothingly. "Here is where Yuki will care for you until a betterness comes. See, I shall heap for you these nice cushions. They are your Japanese pillows. You must lie on them very still, and keep all these shoji shut close until I can go and get some medicine for you."

"No!" said Pierre, fractiously. "Medicine no go! Kusuri, ikanai! Too much kusuri every day at hospital. Nurses all carry spoons in their belts. I don't need more medicine, Yuki; only for you to kiss me. You haven't kissed me all day!" He threw himself among the bright cushions and began tossing his head from side to side.

"I will kiss you when I get back," said Yuki. "Only promise to lie here very quietly until I can come, and many times I will kiss you."

Pierre raised himself on an elbow and looked dubious. "Kiss me before you start," he demanded. "You break promises, you know. And this morning you have such a droll fashion of going suddenly far away, and then starting back quickly, just like the end of a trombone that one is playing. You must be a witch, Yuki, to move so swiftly through the air. Kiss me, or I shall not believe it is really you."

With a heart strained to the limit of endurance Yuki knelt beside him on the matted floor and pressed her ashen lips to the red coal of his mouth. Pierre, seizing her with superhuman strength, kissed her again and again, until the tortured woman felt that she must rend the air in clamor to some native god or demon who might save her. This passion, branded on the soul of Prince HaganÈ's wife, gained a new and terrible power of defilement. In a spasm of anguish she wrenched herself free, went backward from him, and seized the shoji's edge to hold herself. "I will kiss you no more until you take the medicine," she said, with a steadiness that surprised them both.

He lurched forward, grasping at a swaying sleeve. She eluded him. "If you are not more controlled I will leave you altogether, and send police to take you back to Yokohama!" He grovelled at her feet and whimpered. "I'll be good. Don't send me, Yuki. But if I lie quite still you'll kiss me many, many times again when you return, won't you?"

Yuki hesitated. He dragged himself half upright. "You shall. I'll kill you! I'll kill myself, here! You must kiss me. A wife always kisses her husband. Swear that you will kiss me!" The light of increased madness glared in his beautiful eyes.

"Yes, I'll kiss you, I swear it," faltered the girl. Pierre laughed foolishly in his satisfaction. "Then I'll lie still among your pillows, little wife. Old prince sha'n't find us. Put us in boiling oil, that old prince. Don't be gone too long, little wife."

Yuki hurried along the intricate paths toward the house. Dry sobs rose one after another slowly, coming relentlessly upward in her slender throat with a distention that grew to agony. "I must not stop to think, I cannot give up now," she panted. "O Kwannon Sama, what am I to do?" This black hour, like some dark chemical, was turning the memory of all other grief to light. The one conscious thought which her mind hugged jealously was Pierre's necessity for medicine. Fortunately, she knew a little of this, and kept a well-filled chest. His fever was terrific. Human pity demanded that she first allay this raving torment of the blood before delivering him to cold officials, or even to Count Ronsard of the French Legation. Her thoughts and plans in this present bewilderment could get no further than the fever-draught now to be given the sick man. With shaking hands she prepared it, and then a second drink, a powerful sleeping-potion. She got back to him as noiselessly as she had come. Apparently no one had seen her. Pierre was now in actual fever-madness. He had thrown coat, waistcoat, and watch in various parts of the room. The cushions were strewn wide. A corner of one rested in hibachi ashes. In one of his hands he clasped tightly the half of a long ivory hairpin.

With the patience of a mother and the ingenuity of a wife she coaxed him, at length, into swallowing one of the draughts. He did not demand the promised kisses. He did not know her now, or, rather, the recognitions came in short flashes, like heat lightning. Sometimes he took her to be Gwendolen and accused her angrily of connivance with HaganÈ and the ambitious Onda family. Again he thought her the German head physician and raved of his wrongs. He passed rapidly from one language to the other, essaying at times his broken Japanese. It was generally in English that he denounced his faithless sweetheart, and the epithets directed against her caused Yuki's heart to sink with shame,—not for herself, but for him.

A longer interval of sanity came. He recognized his companion with piteous little cries and tears of joy. He believed that at last they were married, and prattled on of the long, happy future, of their little home in France, until Yuki, having come for the moment to the end of suffering's capacity, listened with a dreary smile and dull ears.

The second draught, the sleeping-potion, was to be given in half an hour. Through that interminable time she waited, his head upon her aching knees, his fevered hands reaching ever for her face, her shoulder, until lethargy alone saved her from an answering insanity. The plan was half formed in her dull thoughts to administer this potion, then, when slumber overcame him, to close the shoji, and leave Pierre to sleep away the fiercest fever while she could think out a way of getting him from the garden. But for the political meeting, falling so strangely on this very day, the situation would have possessed no great peril. It would have been merely a sick man who, in delirium, had wandered unknowingly into HaganÈ's garden. The servants might have found him; Ronsard have been telephoned for, and Prince HaganÈ himself asked what was best to do. This was what might have been; but here was the matter as it really lay. A Frenchman, and attachÉ of the Legation,—ill or well no less a Frenchman—concealed in HaganÈ's garden, sheltered and protected by HaganÈ's young wife! Yuki gave a convulsive shudder. The sick man gasped, and clutched the air as if he thought himself falling from a height. Fate smiled a thin, hard smile down into Yuki's eyes.

The girl did not resent Fate's prophetic stare. Already she knew herself trapped. Her wild thoughts had run since the beginning of eternity in this same ring of fire. There was time for nothing. The one frail chance was that Pierre should sleep on through the meeting undiscovered. Already twelve o'clock had come. From the high land near the samurai Onda's home, a big bell boomed and quivered out over the city. The echoes stirred and shifted tranquil layers of the noon. Fear sank down like soot upon a crouching woman with the sick man on her knees.

Pierre, for some moments past, had gradually ceased the restless tossing of his head, and was forgetting to utter short, disjointed words. The fair hair, that had been so stiff and dry, clung now in moist locks about his temple. His delicate hands ceased twitching and picking at Yuki's gown, and fell over limply on the floor. Caught loosely in the right hand lay the broken hairpin. To any Japanese, of any class, this would be fatal evidence. Under her fairy-like touch he gave a start, clutched more firmly at the pin she was trying to take, and threw his hand upward above his heart. Again Fate smiled, and Yuki bowed her head. Now a soft, regular breathing began. The healing sleep was on the sufferer. His face was growing young and gentle. Yuki stared down into it, tearless. Her heart, like some living entity beaten and tortured too long, had lost the power of sensitive response. There was only a dull, incessant aching that was becoming, already, an acknowledged part of her.

He was safe. To-day's crisis, at least of the devouring heat, was over. He would awake refreshed and clear. As for her, everything had grown so vague and far-away she cared very little what might happen. The insensibility of reaction bore her outward on a warm tide. Danger lost its meaning, and grew but a shadow-play on life. A Frenchman in HaganÈ's garden, and a crucial meeting to go on in the house! There was something piquant, fetching, in the idea. Yuki nodded above it and smiled. Oh, she was so tired, so tired of everything! A little malicious something was tapping, tapping, just at the base of her brain. The ache at her heart benumbed her. A desire, dull and insistent as the pain itself, crept to her, just to lie upon the matting near poor Pierre and rest. They belonged together, the weak ones. Chance and disappointment had thrown them about like toys. What had such as they to do with the God HaganÈ? Yes, she had better fail once more, and it would be the last. Let the grave statesmen come and go, let HaganÈ seek her! She had nothing to do but the easiest of all things, just to do nothing, and all this benumbing misery would be at an end.

She wondered, still smiling, in what way HaganÈ would kill her. She fingered curiously the stops of a dozen fearful thoughts, and felt no fear. Had law permitted him to carry the two swords of his class, the short one would deal a quick and merciful death. Since he was unarmed perhaps he would simply let one of the servants slay her, not caring to soil his hands with such feeble stains.

An influence was coming over her in rhythms, like tepid waves. A delicious lightness blew upon her brain. She gasped for insensibility as for music, dumb, perfumed music, drunk in by pores of the flesh. One small nerve of desire began to tingle. "Oh, let it go on," she cried to her soul; "have no interference! Let me pass into nothingness by this heavenly gliding!"

As from a great distance came footsteps and the sound of commonplace voices. Yuki moaned aloud, and crept an inch nearer her companion.

"She was seen last coming in this direction," said a speaker; "Ii, the gardener, saw her."

"She is not in the adzuma-ya! Can it be that our gracious lady has gone for repose to the tea-rooms?"

"Baka!" exclaimed the other whom she now recognized as Tora, the butler; "is not that great official residence sad enough and lonely, that the poor child seeks a more desolate place? I pity her."

"Luncheon becomes honorably cold upon the table," murmured the boy, showing compassion in his own way. "And foreign food when chilled, with the grease becoming as wax about the edges, is of all sights the most disgusting."

"ArÀ," sighed Tora, "she eats little enough even when the food is hot."

"Those many disgraceful things said of our lady in the newspapers,"—the younger servant was beginning, when Tora stopped him fiercely. "Gossip not of your betters, boy! You should not read such things. There are no truths in printed scandals. Come, not that way, she is not in the tea-rooms. I see a fresh disturbance of the gravel along this path."

To the listener's intense relief they turned sharply to the left. Wide awake now with an intensity of sensitiveness that made every stirring leaf an enemy, the young wife crept outward from between two shoji, closing them with the extreme of care. In full sight, on the veranda, lay her little foreign handkerchief. No other woman on the place used lace-bordered handkerchiefs. Tora must have seen and recognized it, and, in an instant, perhaps, of protection, have led the boy aside. Yuki's cheek burned. She dared not think Tora's thoughts. This humiliation was a wound made with a weapon of poor metal, yet she could not, even then, refuse gratitude for the delicate consideration.

As the two servants came again into the main part of the garden, their mistress walked quite leisurely a few yards before, stooping now and then to a flower, or gazing up with smiles to a blossoming cherry-branch.

"Luncheon is served, your Ladyship," said Tora, gravely, and bowed before her in the path.

"I will come immediately," returned Yuki. She did not meet his eyes.