Barbara leaned against the palpitant rail, the light air fanning her breeze-cool cheek, her arteries beating like tiny drums, atune with the throb, throb, throb, of the steel deck as the black ocean leviathan swept on toward its harbor resting-place. All that Japanese April day she had been in a state of tremulous excitement. She had crept from her berth at dawn to see the hazy sun come up in a Rosicrucian flush as weirdly soft as a mirage, to strain her eyes for the first filmy feather of land. Long before the gray-green wisp showed on the horizon, the sight of a lumbering junk with its square sail laced across with white stripes, and its bronze seamen, with white loin-cloth and sweat-band about the forehead, naked and thewed like sculptures, as they swayed from the clumsy tiller, had sent a thrill through her. And as the first far peaks etched themselves on the robin's-egg blue, as impalpable For Japan, every sight and sound of it, had been woven with the earliest imaginings of Barbara's orphaned life. Her father she had never seen. Her mother she remembered only as a vague, widowed figure. In Japan they two had met and had married, and after a single year her mother had returned to her own place and people broken-hearted and alone. In the month of her return Barbara had been born. A year ago her aunt, to whom she owed the care of her young girlhood, had died, and Barbara had found herself, at twenty-three, mistress of a liberal fortune and of her own future. Japan had always exercised a potent spell over her imagination. She pictured it as a land of strange glowing trees, of queer costumes and weird, fantastic buildings. More than all, it was the land of her mother's life-romance, where her father had loved and died. There was one other tangible tie—her uncle, her mother's brother, was Episcopal bishop of Tokyo. He was returning now from a half year's visit in America, and this fact, coupled with an invitation from Patricia Dandridge, the daughter of the American Ambassador, with whom Barbara had chummed one California winter, had constituted an opportunity wholly alluring. So she found herself, on this April day, the pallid Pacific fuming away behind her, gazing with kindling cheeks on The land was wonderfully nearer now. The hills lay, a clear pile of washed grays and greens, with saffron tinted valleys between, wound in a haze of tender lilac. By imperceptible gradations this unfolded, caught sub-tones, ermine against umbers, of warmer red and flickering emerald, white glints of sun on surf like splashes of silver, till suddenly, spectral and perfect, above a cluster of peaks like purple gentians, glowed forth a phantom mountain, its golden wistaria cone inlaid in the deeper azure. It hung like an inverted morning-glory, mist and mother-of-pearl at the top, shading into porphyry veined with streaks of verd and jade—Fuji-San, the despair of painters, the birthplace of the ancient gods. The aching beauty of it stung Barbara with a tender, intolerable pang. The little fishing-villages that presently came into sight, tucked into the clefts of the shore, with gray dwellings, elfishly frail, climbing the green slope behind them—the growing rice in patches of cloudy gold on the hillsides—the bluish shadows of bamboo groves—all touched her with an incommunicable delight. A shadow fell beside her and she turned. It was her uncle. His clean-shaven face beamed at her over his clerical collar. "Isn't it glorious?" she breathed. "It's better Bishop Randolph was a bachelor, past middle age, ruddy and with eyes softened by habitual good-humor. He was the son of a rector of a rich Virginian parish, which on his father's death had sent the son a unanimous call. He had answered, "No; my place is in Japan," without consciousness of sacrifice. For him, in the truest sense, the present voyage was a homeward one. "Japan gets into the blood," he said musingly. "I often think of the old lady who committed suicide at Nikko. She left a letter which said: 'By favor of the gods, I am too dishonorably old to hope to revisit this jewel-glorious spot, so I prefer augustly to remain here for ever!' I have had something of the same feeling, sometimes. I remember yet the first time I saw the coast. That was twenty-five years ago. We watched it together—your father and I—just as we two are doing now." She looked at him with sudden eagerness, for of his own accord he had never before spoken to her of her dead father. The latter had always seemed a very real personage, but how little she knew about him! The aunt who had brought her up—her Such was the story, as Barbara knew it, of her father and mother—a love chapter which had soon closed with a far-away grave by the Inland Sea. Her fancy had made of her father a pathetic figure. As a child, she had dreamed of some day placing a He gazed at her a moment in a startled fashion, then looked away, his hand shading his eyes. When she finished there was a long pause which made her wonder. She touched his arm. "You were very fond of father, weren't you?" "Yes," he said, in a tone oddly restrained. "Yes," and after a pause: "I married them." "Then they went to Nagasaki," she said softly, "and there—he died. You weren't there then?" "No," he answered in a low voice. His face was still turned away, and she caught an unaccustomed note of feeling in his voice. He left her abruptly and began to pace up and down the deck, while she stood watching the shoreline sharpen, the tangled blur of harbor resolve and shift into manifold detail. Shapeless dots had become anchored ships, a black pencil a wharf, a long yellow-gray streak a curved shore-front lined with buildings, and the warm green blotch rising behind it a foliaged hill pricked out with soft, gray roofs. There was a rush of passengers to one side, where from a brisk little tug, at whose peak floated a flag bearing a blood-red sun, a handful of spick-and-span Japanese officials were climbing the ship's ladder. At length the bishop spoke again at her elbow, now in his usual voice: "What are you going to do with that man, Barbara?" A faint flush rose in her cheek. "With what man?" "Austen Ware." She shrugged her shoulders and laughed—a little "He's not the sort to give up a chase." "Even a wild-goose chase?" she countered. "When I was a boy in Virginia," he said with a humorous eye, "I used to chase wild geese, and bag 'em, too." The bishop sauntered away, leaving a frown on Barbara's brow. She had had a swift mental vision of a cool, dark-bearded face and assured bearing that the past year had made familiar. It was a handsome face, if somewhat cold. Its owner was rich, his standing was unquestioned. The fact that he was ten years her senior had but made his attentions the more flattering. He had had no inherited fortune and had been no idler; for this she admired him. If she had not thrilled to his declaration, so far as liking went, she liked him. The week she left New York he had intended a yachting trip to the Mediterranean. When he told her, coolly enough, that he should ask her again in Japan, she had treated it as a jest, though knowing him quite capable of meaning it. From every worldly standpoint he was distinctly eligible. Every one who knew them both confidently expected her to marry Ware. Well, why not? Yet to-day she did not ask herself the question confidently. It belonged still to the limbo of the future—to the convenient "some day" to which her A passenger leaning near her was whistling Sally in our Alley under his breath and a Japanese steward was emptying over the side a vase of wilted flowers. A breath of rose scent came to her, mixed with a faint smell of tobacco, and these and the whistled air awoke a sudden reminiscence. Her gaze went past the clustered shipping, beyond the gray line of buildings and the masses of foliage, and swam into a tremulous June evening seven years past. She saw a wide campus of green sward studded with stately elms festooned with electric lights that glowed in the falling twilight. Scattered about were groups of benches each with its freight of dainty frocks, and on one of them she saw herself sitting, a shy girl of sixteen, on her first visit to a great university. Men went by in sober black gown and flat mortar-boards, young, clean-shaven, and boyish, with arms about one another's shoulders. Here and there an orange "blazer" made a vivid splash of color and groups in white-flannels sprawled beneath the trees under the perfumed haze "Of all the girls that are so smart, There's none like pretty Sally. She is the darling of my heart—" The groups about her had fallen silent—only one voice had said: "That's 'Duke' Daunt." Then the melody suddenly broke queerly and stopped, and the man who had spoken got up quickly and said: "I'm going in. It's time to dress anyway." And somehow his voice had seemed to break queerly, too. Duke Daunt! The scene shifted into the next day, when she had met him for a handful of delirious moments. For how long afterward had he remained her childish idol! Time had overlaid the memory, but it started bright now at the sound of that whistled tune. Her uncle's voice recalled her. He was handing her his binoculars. She took them, chose a spot well forward and glued her eyes to the glass. A sigh of ecstasy came from her lips, for it brought the land almost at arm's length—the stone hatoba crowded with brown Japanese faces, pricked out here and there by the white Panama hat or pith-helmet of the foreigner; at one side a bouquet of gay Nearer, nearer yet, the ship drew on, till there came to meet it two curved arms of breakwater, a miniature lighthouse at each side. The captain on the bridge lifted his hand, and a cheer rose from the group of male passengers below him as the anchor-chain snored through the hawse-holes. Barbara lowered the glass from her eyes. The slow swinging of the vessel to the anchor had brought a dazzling bulk between her gaze and the shore, perilously near. She saw it now in its proper perspective—a trim steam yacht, painted white, with Adjusting the focus Barbara looked. A man in naval uniform who had boarded the ship at Quarantine was pointing out the yacht to a passenger, and Barbara caught crisp bits of sentences: "You see the patches of green?—they're decorations for the Squadron that's due to-morrow. Look just beyond them. Prettiest craft I've ever seen east of the Straits.... Came in this morning. Owner's in Nara now, doing the temples.... Has a younger brother who's been out here for a year, going the pace.... They won't let private yachts lie any closer in or they'd go high and dry on empty champagne bottles." Barbara was feeling a strange sensation of familiarity. Puzzled, she withdrew her gaze, then looked once more. Suddenly she dropped the glass with a startled exclamation. "What are you going to do with that man?"—her uncle's query seemed to echo satirically about her. For the white yacht was Austen Ware's, and there, on the gleaming bows, in polished golden letters, was the name BARBARA |