The HaganÈ villa at Kamakura possessed its own green niche cut deep into encroaching hills, its own curved scimitar of gray sea-beach, its individual rocks, its blue ocean, and bluer sky. A fence of dead bamboo branches, set up on end like fagots, barred out spying curiosity. The house faced directly to the sand. On the three remaining sides the hill-slopes made retreating walls. Upon them grew spindling, wind-tossed pines and loops of wild white clematis and of rose.

Through the big, fragrant rooms of the villa all day the sea-winds passed, stirring the few kakemono, and making flowers in bronze vases nod like those more securely rooted on the hills. No attempt had been made at an ornamental garden, except for a few great, gray stones spread with a lichen sparkling from its diet of salty dew, three curious small pines, and spaces of white sand. The placing of these trees and stones hinted of more organic beauty than all the convolutions of the average Occidental millionnaire's park. It is only fair to add that the millionnaire would not agree to this.

The first two hours after arrival were devoted by Prince HaganÈ to the writing of telegrams and letters. These were sent off by messengers as soon as finished. The statesman strode out alone to the shore and walked there, his head bent in meditation, until telegraphic answers began to arrive. These apparently bore reassuring news. He sought out Yuki, his sleeves quite stiff with crumpled missives, and told her that already he had arranged his affairs so that he could have two days to belong to himself alone. "Unless some unforeseen matter of gravest importance should transpire," he added, "I shall not be disturbed. I shall give orders to Bunshichi to bring me no letters that do not bear the Imperial seal. And now, my child," here he seated himself near her, "I may be permitted to recall the fact that I have a wife."

For two days Yuki was seldom out of his sight. The shrinking, delicate, humble, exquisite thing, now so entirely his own, fed his stern eyes and heart with ever-deepening satisfaction. Her pallor, her reticence, even the strained smile which she sometimes turned to meet his words, were all as best he liked to have them. An arrogant, self-assertive bride is, to the Japanese, an inhuman monster.

On the third morning Bunshichi brought him with his breakfast the accumulated mail of the two days. At sight of the great heap he sent a quizzical glance to Yuki. "It appears, small sweet one," he remarked, "that I am to have no more hours of happy indolence."

Before the first ten were read Yuki knew herself forgotten. Her bruised soul stirred within her like a wounded thing recalled to animation. She started violently at his next loud words. "I take the earliest train to Tokio. Have my kuruma waiting." His voice was that of a master, not a lover.

Yuki rose swiftly. At the kitchen-step she paused, threw back her head, and took in a few long, long breaths. The servants below waited, open-mouthed, for her orders. Meta's kind voice recalled her.

"What do you wish, August Mistress?"

"Oh, yes, Meta—I was thinking—I forgot. The master takes the next train to Tokio. When does that train start?"

Meta's eye consulted the Waterbury clock. "In twenty minutes, Mistress. Perhaps the Illustrious One will not wish to hasten so swiftly."

"Yes, yes, he desires to go at once. Go quickly, Bunshichi, call a kuruma with two runners. Our master is a heavy man."

Her commission filled, Yuki returned slowly to the room where her husband still sat reading letters. On the way a thought smote her. "Your Highness, the train in twenty minutes honorably departs. Your kuruma will be in readiness. Was it your august intention that I should accompany you?"

HaganÈ looked up at her in a sort of half-recognition.

"You? Accompany? No, of course not. I would not have the time to give you. In a few days more, perhaps. Put those scattered letters and papers into a leathern portfolio. Bunshichi will know what else I need. How fortunate that a train goes so soon!"

Between this and the starting moment he had for her neither look nor word. Just as he stepped, however, into the vehicle, he turned as with sudden, loving remembrance, and leaning far down to her said, "These days have been as the heavenly island of Horai set in a sea of raging politics. You are a docile and obedient wife. So shall I inform your father."

When he had really gone, and even the heavy clink of jinrikisha wheels on sand was no longer audible, Yuki lifted her head, brushed back the low fall of hair from her forehead, stared at the quiet sea for a moment, and then turned and walked back slowly into the house. For a few moments she wavered, pausing now, now walking swiftly, now looking about as for something she had lost. In such broken, indeterminate angles of advance she reached a little chamber quite remote from the rest, a closet darkened by nearness of a rising cliff. Here she stopped short. A physical shudder ran through the length of her. She moaned, bit her lips back into silence, pressed suddenly white hands upon her vacant eyes, and then, failing all at once, fell to the matting, and lay, face down, along its pallid surface. At last—at last—for a few hours at least this tortured smile, this self-inflicted strain could be shaken off and she, like a driven beast of burden, could lie still, to die, to moan, or slowly to gather back what remained of endurance. Her thoughts buzzed confusedly like a great swarm of bees whose nest has been taken.

Through the sweet spring day she lay prone, inanimate, stirring only at a passing sting of consciousness. "My country—my Emperor!" once she moaned aloud. "O Kwannon the Merciful! O my Christian God!—must I live, can I endure it? Already I am cowed and broken. Shall I ever again look a flower in the face?"

More than once the kind-hearted maid-servant knelt beside her, urging food and drink, or a walk into the reviving air. Yuki seemed not to hear. After one such unsuccessful excursion, Meta returned to the kitchen, shaking her head. "They have married that beautiful young maiden to our august yet somewhat ancient master, and her heart's love dies within her for another. Oh, I know well enough!" she cried, with a touch of defiance, as her father lifted bleared, protesting eyes; "so was I bartered to the wicked man who beat me and drove me forth. I may be of low estate, but I know a woman's heart."

"Then you know the seat of folly," grumbled the old man. "When your husband drove you out, I suppose he had reason; I received you, didn't I?—I allow you still to call me father—"

"Yes, and do all your work and mine too for it," muttered the woman.

"As for our young mistress," went on the old man, ignoring this last impertinence, "all know her for the most fortunate young woman in this empire and, therefore, in the world. Is she not lawfully married to the richest and most powerful of lords, to Prince HaganÈ?"

Meta seated herself on a low bench and began to clean the fish for dinner. "Yes, father," she answered at length, "and this newly snared fish whose honorable insides I am preparing to remove is to be eaten by that same rich and powerful lord. Does that make the knife in its belly less sharp?"

The round sun was bisected by a western hill-top pine when Meta knelt again beside her mistress. "August Lady, you must listen. A telegram has arrived."

Yuki sat up instantly. She had begun to tremble. Her hair, now disordered, fell about an ashen face. "Has my master come?" she cried, a wild look flashing into her eyes, but lapsing almost immediately into dulness. She put up both hands and spread wide the night-black wings of her hair. Meta drew down one little hand and thrust the telegram between its fingers. "Oh, a telegram," said Yuki, embarrassed.

"Why did you not mention—perhaps Lord HaganÈ will not come back to-night." She read the few words carefully. Again that faint, sickening throb of relief passed over her. She lifted her head and met the woman's eyes as she said, trying to seem calm and unconcerned, "It is true,—our master cannot come to-night. He bids me remain until further message."

Meta bowed. "Condescend to receive my condolence, noble Mistress. You will be honorably lonely, I fear. But such is always the fate of one married to a great statesman like our lord."

"Yes," said Yuki, eagerly, "and, Meta, I wish last of all things to become an obstacle in his illustrious path."

"Mistress," said the servant, in her honest way, with a smile like sunshine dawning upon the broad, fresh-colored face, "all day you have eaten nothing. May I not prepare a little meal to tempt your appetite?"

"You are kind to me, Meta," said the young wife. She put a hand out to the servant's arm. For some reason known only to women, the eyes of both flooded with tears.

"Yes," said Yuki, her own smile dawning, "prepare me the little dinner. I will try very hard to eat. Indeed I think even now I am becoming quite ravenous!"

Meta, laughing outright, hurried back to the kitchen. She was a good cook, and she knew it. In this same villa-kitchen she had served marvellous dishes to prime ministers and princes, but never before had she worked with a heart so full of love and tender compassion. Never was a meal more daintily served. Slices of tai from the salt waves, embellished with grated daikon and small foreign radishes; lily-bulbs dug from the hills around them and boiled with sugar and wine into balls of crumbling sweetness; lotos roots from the temple pond, sliced thin and served with vinegar, ginger-root and shoyu, salad of yellow chrysanthemums, pickles of coleus, cucumber and egg-plant, the whitest of rice, and tea picked but the week before by the dew-wet hands of little maids at Uji. Yuki was literally betrayed into enjoyment. As she ate, Meta and the old man peeped in at her through the shoji, nudging each other joyously at each new mouthful.

Later in the evening, when lamps were lighted, and the shoji all drawn close, the two servants, with that delicate familiarity, that respectful presumption of which they have made an art, found pretext to enter. At first there was but the usual salutation, and the expressions of gratitude that she had condescended to partake of such badly prepared food. One question led to another. In a few moments the three were chatting and laughing like schoolgirls, the old man bearing, in his double superiorities of age and sex, the greater share of the conversation. Yuki soon found that he had a single theme,—the perfections of Prince HaganÈ. More from kindness of heart than interest, she encouraged him in these reminiscences; but in a very short time she was listening as Desdemona to her Moor. The tales indeed were marvellous. Once, at the age of six, or so said Bunshichi, the little SanÈtomo had gone at night alone to a distant graveyard to bring home, as proof of his courage, the severed head of a criminal that day executed. At eight he had slain with his own hand a monstrous mountain-cat, terror of a cringing village. But the story which most impressed the listener was that of a poor leper, a beggar already eaten away beyond hope of relief, who, having asked alms by the roadway, was questioned, the young prince fixing thoughtful eyes upon him, "You ask for money to buy food, is that the best gift I could offer you?"

"Nay, Master," answered the thing who once was man, "there is a better."

"Name it," said HaganÈ.

"Death," sobbed the beggar.

"So think I," cried the boy, and, without further speech, sent his short sword to the leper's heart.

Meta always shuddered at this tale; but Yuki raised her head with so still and white a look that the old man felt uneasy, and began to explain at length. "It was really the best gift, Mistress, and after it our princeling had him buried, and many, many prayers said for the rest of his soul. He even caused search to be made for his family."

"Do you think I wish excuse for it?" said Yuki, with her strange smile. "I know not which most I envy, the beggar or Prince HaganÈ."

The next day, fair and sweet and practically windless, except in gusts of "pine-wind" from the shore, deepened the balm of her preceding hours. Wild pinks sprang up like a fairy people on the hills. Crows perched and chattered in the garden pines. Little red crabs came out, and all day long drew marvellous maps upon the sand; and the swinging censers of hillside roses burned a little timid incense to the sun. All the forenoon Yuki busied herself about the house. A long letter was written to Iriya filled with descriptions of the day. Frequent excursions to the kitchen kept Meta and old Bunshichi in a condition of expectant smiles. In the afternoon a sudden thought came, bearing to the girl's mind a hint of wonder at her own insensibility. "Why, the Great Buddha is here, not a mile away from me, and not once have I remembered. I will go to him!"

Meta heard the stirring, and peeped. "Our mistress goes for a walk," she told her father. "Even now she lifts her adzuma-coat. I will get her geta (clogs). Nothing could be better for her than a walk. It is the good food that gives her strength."

"These young things beat their wings like the cliff-birds when the cage first snaps, but soon they come to reason and docility," chuckled the old man over his pipe.

"I go to the Great Buddha, Meta San," said Yuki.

"Will you not take an umbrella—not even a foreign bat-umbrella—to protect your illustrious head?"

"On these short days the sun sinks very early. See, already he becomes entangled, like a boy's red kite, in the branches of those tall hill pines. I need no covering."

"Should the august master deign to arrive before your divine reappearance—" suggested Meta, with deference and a deep bow.

Yuki's face changed utterly. "I—I—did not think of him," she stammered. "I will not be long absent, and, Meta, should he come, send quickly a runner and a kuruma for me. Do you think he will be angry, Meta, that I went?"

"Nay, little Mistress, he would wish it. There is no kinder man alive than Prince HaganÈ."

"I suppose he must be very kind," murmured Yuki, and went with downcast looks into the street. The sense of childish anticipation, of vivid expectancy were gone. Meta, in her effort to be dutiful, had clamped more tightly the manacles her mistress had just begun to endure. Why should she wish to go? What matter that the Buddha waited? It was not for her; she could but drag before it HaganÈ's obedient wife, a cowed white ghost of duty. She moved forward mechanically. Her head sank still further forward, as if the great black orchid of her hair grew heavier. At every step the lacquered bars of her high clogs went deep into sand, so that it was increasingly hard to walk. A group of children, passing, looked up into the pretty lady's face for a smile, then hurried by in a small panic of fear. It is a strange woman who does not smile at children in Japan.

Now she crossed at right angles the one street of the village, a rough and stony thoroughfare lined with opened booths. The street terminates abruptly at the foot of a hill whereon stands an ancient and famous temple of Kwannon the Merciful. Within a hundred yards of this hill an abrupt turn to the right leads into a country of unfenced fields of egg-plant, peanuts, and sweet potatoes; then comes another bit of hard paved road, and then the towering Red Gate of the temple grounds of Buddha.

Yuki had noted dully that in little gardens the cherry trees, always earlier here than in Tokio, were fashioning their annual robes of pink. The wind from the sea, now rising, threw petals out into the air before her. She watched the fluttering signals eagerly, but for some morbid reason would not lift her eyes to the tree. She had but one thought now,—a hunger for the Buddha's face. She longed to test herself, to find whether, in the gap between the Christian Yuki and the Princess HaganÈ, a shred of herself still clung. This shred, it must be, that the Buddha would smile upon.

Through the gate she stumbled, her gaze still on the ground. The wide stone pathway stretched soft and pink with fallen bloom. A breeze, entering with her, swept the surface in a mass, as though some one twitched the far end of a long pink rug. Petals filled the air. They came now in a small hurricane, fretting her cheeks with ghostly fingers, burrowing softly in her collar, catching and clinging to the long folds of her robe. A sob stretched in her throat and hurt her. She would not raise her eyes. She reached the two long granite steps leading up to the inner court of the Buddha. Here petals were banked in rosy drifts. She could see the bases of stone lanterns standing before the shrine. An invisible hand seemed pressing on her shoulder.

"Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu!" sobbed her lost childhood through her trembling lips.

An old priest, old beyond the telling, with a face as of wrinkled silver, glided out from among the flower-laden trees. "You are in great grief, my child?"

"Yes, reverend sir, in great grief; and it is of that kind which, to a stronger heart, might not be called a grief."

"I know; that is a kind hard to endure, but its triumph gives greatest enlightenment. Look to the face of Buddha, and pray for his endurance."

"Pitying sir," sobbed the girl, "I have become, while in the foreign land, a Christian."

The smile on the old priest's face did not alter. "All new religions are but forms of the old. Buddha will not pity thee less that thou dost call him 'Ye-sus,' for He, too, was a Buddha, even as you and I, daughter, even you and I, through long striving, may become."

"I will dare, then, raise my eyes to him," answered the girl. The old man stood very close to her, and as he saw the white face lift, joined his hands and whispered, "Namu Amida Butsu!" A moment later he was gone. Petals eddied and settled where he had stood.

At first the young wife felt little emotion of any sort. She gazed steadily into the marvellous, calm face with a glint of gold under the half-closed lids and in the jewel on the forehead. As she looked, it grew to be a thing not smoothed and fashioned by human hands, but by the eyes and hearts of worshippers,—the apotheosis, the embodiment of a majestic faith, so subtly wrought of faith that should belief be changed, it, too, would vanish like a mist, its vibrant particles loosen and dissipate, to recombine in some new symbol. How still it was and calm and self-assured! Its lines were growing rigid like the formula of its creed; but in that changeless, ever-changing, pitying smile, a deathless truth still trembled. Near it the hills seemed little piles of dust; pines, centuries old, mere fern-leaves of a summer.

"Give me calm, give me endurance, for they are yours to give!" said the girl, aloud. "I am less than the insects which crawl unnoticed in the grass,—I am a blown petal, frail as these I crush. If my life can serve this land, or aid, in infinitesimal good, my Emperor, why can I not be glad and desire no more?"

The sun had fallen far below the hills. A crimson light, a more ethereal tide, flowed across the sea, and soaked up into the fibres of blue horizon mist. A cricket with the chill of winter in his little voice woke into querulous chiding. Yuki shivered and rose to her feet, drawing the robe more tightly. She sent a glance about the wide gardens, and saw that, apparently, she was alone. She turned as if to go, but an overpowering instinct made her lift her face again to the brooding face above her. How colossal, how patient, those dark shoulders bent in the deepening twilight! Around the lotos pedestal, the cherry trees, touched now by dull crimson light, changed to great billows of a smouldering sea. Crows darted through them like strange black fish, then flew off, cawing, to homes in the pines. Again Yuki turned to go, when a voice that froze her to the stone said softly, "Ah, Madame HaganÈ, what felicity to meet!"

Pierre had sprung from some unknown shadow. He must have been watching her and listening to her words. He paused now, debonair, handsome, though a little pale, directly beneath an outcurving granite petal of the Buddha's throne. As she still stared, speechless, he struck a match against the bronze and lighted a cigarette. She could not see, for her own trembling, how his poor hands shook. The red match glare revealed his face as distorted, evil, sinister.

"Well," he remarked once more, "have you nothing to say to me?"

This time she tried to speak, but no sound came. Her power of motion, too, was in abeyance. He moved three deliberate steps nearer. As though the air were glass, and she repelled by its material force, she went backward the answering distance. Her left hand, clutching behind her, found something hard and cold, and fastened to it eagerly. It was the fin of a bronze dragon in full relief, twining upward, about the trunk of a tall lantern. "Yes, go," she whispered. "Do not speak more words. Go!"

Pierre took another stride. She cowered back bodily into the writhing folds.

"For the love of God!" she panted.

"What if one has ceased to love God?"

"In mercy then—in pity—in human pity—go!"

Pierre laughed. "You enjoin pity, Madame HaganÈ? How quaint!"

"I am more deeply hurted now than you; but never more must I be weak. I am a wife. I shall serve my native country!"

"Does treachery and faithlessness ever serve? You delude yourself. If HaganÈ is to be your strength, you will fail,—for either HaganÈ or I must die. I live now only to revenge myself upon him!"

The emptiness of the boast, the impotence of the suffering boy to wreak the harm he wished, did not then come to her. The words rang sombre and terrible. "No—no, Pierre," she cried, "not that! Our Emperor needs him—our country needs. Revenge on me, Pierre! I only was faithless. I deserve all harm you will give."

"Yes, you were faithless, but it came because of weakness, and the low status of your sex in this barbaric land. HaganÈ and your father forced you. They threatened, cowed you—tortured you, for all I know. Look at your hands! Mon Dieu, your little hands!"

She held them forth to him with a gesture that might have disarmed Beelzebub. "I tore them myself upon that hedge the night you came,—the night I had promised Prince HaganÈ."

Pierre glared at her an instant longer. Oh, he had meant to be so harsh! Nothing was to have softened his just wrath. Through sleepless nights he had scourged himself with memory until his soul was flayed. Yuki should not appeal to him or move him. He would get from her own lips some faltering explanation of her perfidy. Yet now, for all his armor of resolve, two little torn hands held out silently through deepening gloom pulled at his heart,—drew down the visor from his quivering face.

Above them bent, like a great cloud, the head and stooping shoulders of the Buddha.

"Yuki, Yuki, you have ruined my life! You have killed my soul! I cannot consent to live unless to revenge myself upon the man who has brought us both this agony!"

"Pierre, if you say such thing, I must—because I am now Japanese wife—warn my master of it."

This new affront to vanity stung Pierre back into some of his assumed relentlessness. "You would defend him,—betray me already? Count Ronsard said it would be so, but I would not listen. Why should you be true to him when you were false as hell to me? I'll kill him, I tell you, and if I cannot kill him in open fight, I will find some way to harm him! I'll have you yet, Madame la Princesse. I do not give you up, even at your own words. You owe me something! Come, come, you owe me reparation,—help me trick him, Yuki. You love me,—ah, I know it! This is my first triumph, that your heart cannot forget. Yes, yes, poor shivering slave, it is Pierre you love. Now, come, deny it! When his arms are around you, do you not think of mine? When his thick lips press you, do you not faint for me? Ah, I have touched you!"

"Go—I say to you again, go, and go quickly! You with your own speech cauterize my wound. You are a coward! Your words are vipers which give their deepest venom first to you!"

In speaking the girl had drawn herself very erect. Her face, through the twilight, gleamed luminous with inner fire. Over her left shoulder the open mouth of the dragon yawned. Pierre could not meet her look. He cowered back, and pressed his eyes with one trembling hand.

"Yuki, Yuki, indeed I scarcely know what I am saying. This misery bewilders me. I cannot eat or sleep. My thoughts surge in my brain like fire in a battened ship. And this is worst of all, that now, so soon, you are tamed,—half reconciled! You have not loved me!"

"If I love or not love, I must not now remember. Pierre, pity me a little. Go from Nippon; help me to be the good woman, and the loyal one."

But to this appeal Pierre could not reach. "I do not give you up," he muttered sullenly. "And I will harm HaganÈ when and how I can!"

Yuki stepped forward a little, still keeping one hand on the dragon. "Then stand aside, Monsieur Le Beau. I must return."

Pierre did not move. "You shall not go," he said in the same sullen fashion. Yuki cast a despairing glance over toward the small house where the old priest lived, then down the long stone walk, now white with petals. No one was in sight. She gave a heavy sigh. On the instant the sound of Japanese clogs came, mounting, apparently, the stone steps of the great red gate. A form of a man in Japanese robes, unusually tall for his race, slow and majestic in approach, now became visible.

"HaganÈ!" she said, with a great repressed cry, and bit her lips to keep from sobbing.

"Diable!" echoed Pierre. He gave a single look, a curse, and pitching his cigarette on the stone flag near her, vanished into the shadows of the lotos throne. Yuki, half-fainting now, hung in the coils of the dragon. As though life itself depended on his coming, she watched her husband's calm advance. His stride was slow, splendid, and imposing, each step eloquent of centuries of rulership. On catching sight of her she felt that he smiled. He moved no faster. "My Lord," she murmured, not knowing that she had said it.

The cigarette blinked as with a single malevolent eye, and sent up an acrid smoke between them. He stepped over it, apparently unobservant, and held out a hand. Yuki clutched at it.

"Why, small sweet one, how white your face gleams through the darkness! And you lie, like a crystal ball of fate, in the old dragon's claws! Well, here is a larger dragon come to bear you home."

Yuki tottered toward him. At first touch of his hand had come the sense of renewed power. "I dreamed not, Lord, that your august returning might be so soon, or I should not have left your house. I left with Meta the message—"

"She gave it carefully, but I preferred to come in person for thee, little one. Here, lean on me. You tremble. Perhaps the walk has been too long. To-morrow we are to leave this quiet place, and you will be Madame HaganÈ, wife of the Minister of War,—Madame HaganÈ, official mistress of a huge and unattractive residence. But you will brighten it, and your friends of the American Legation shall aid you."

"I shall try with all my soul and strength, Lord, to be worthy of you."

"I do not fear, my child. All things are not to be at once expected of a single small flake of maidenhood and snow. How yet you tremble! Here, I will draw your arm in mine. Cling to me. Never mind if the children on the road laugh at us and say that the old prince is mad with love of his young wife. In the great city I must often forget you. But wait one instant—"

He had been standing, half-turned from the great Buddha. Now he faced it, Yuki falling back a little. He raised both hands, rubbed them softly together in invocation, and Yuki, marvelling at him, heard the reverent words, "Namu Amida Butsu! Namu Amida Butsu!"