When Barbara awoke next morning she lay for a moment staring open-eyed from her big pillow at the white wall above, where a hanging-shelf projected to guard the sleeper from falling plaster in earthquake. The room was filled with a soft light that filtered in through the split-bamboo blinds. Then she remembered: it was her first whole day in Japan.

She felt full of a gay insouciance, a glad lightness of joy that she had never felt before. Slipping a thin rose-colored robe over her nightgown, she threw open the window and leaned out. The air was as pure and clean as if it had been sieved through silk, and she breathed it with long inspirations. It made her think of the unredeemed dirt of other countries, the sooty air of crowded factories, hardly growing foliage and unlovely walls.

The Embassy was a pretentious frame structure in which frequent alterations had masked an original plan. With its tall porte-cochÈre, its long narrow L which served as Chancery, the smaller white cottage across the lawn occupied by the Secretary of Embassy, the rambling servants' quarters and stables, it suggested some fine old Virginia homestead, transported by Aladdin's genii to the heart of an oriental garden. For the tiny rock-knoll, with its single twisted pine-tree in front of the main door, the wistaria arbor and red dwarf maples, the great stone lanterns, the miniature lake and pebbled rivulet spanned by its arching bridge—all these were Japanese. In the early morning the eerie witchery of the night was gone, but the sky was as deep as space and the air languid with the perfume and warmth of a St. Martin's summer. A green-golden glow tinged the camelia hedges and above them the long cool expanse of weather-boarding and olive blinds—like a carving in jade and old ivory.

As she stood there bathed in the sunlight, her hands dividing the curtains, Barbara made a gracious part of the glimmering setting. Her thick, ruddy hair sprang curling from her strongly modeled forehead, and fell about her white shoulders, a warm reddish mass against the delicately tinted curtain. There was a thoroughbred straightness in the lines of the tall figure, in the curve of the cheek and the round directness of the chin; and her eyes, bent on the lucent green, were the color of brown sea-water under sapphire cloud-shadows.

From a circle of evergreens near the porte-cochÈre a white flag-pole rose high above the treetops. The stars-and-stripes floated from its halyards, for the day was the national holiday of an European power. In the hedges sparrows were twittering, and in a plum-tree a uguisu—the little Buddhist bird that calls the sacred name of the Sutras—was warbling his sweet, slow, solemn syllables: "Ho-kek-yo! Ho-kek-yo!" A gardener was sweeping the pink rain of cherry-petals from the paths with a twig broom, the long sleeves of his blue kimono fluttering in the yellow sunshine, and in front of the servants' quarters a little girl in flapping sandals was skipping rope with a chenille fascinator. Beyond the wall of the compound Barbara could see the street, a low row of open shops. In one, a number of men and girls, sitting on flat mats, were making bamboo fans. At the corner stood a round well, from which a group of women, barefooted and with tucked-up clothing, were drawing water in unpainted wooden buckets with polished brass hoops, and beside it, under a dark blue awning, a man and woman were grinding rice in a hand-mill made of two heavy stone disks. A blue-and-white figured towel was bound about the woman's head against the fine white rice-dust. Above them, on a tiny portico, an old man, with the calm, benevolent face of a porcelain mandarin, was watering an unbelievably-twisted dwarf plum on which was a single bunch of blossoming. At the side of the street grew a gnarled kiri tree, its shambling roots encroaching on the roadway. In their cleft was set a wooden Shinto shrine with small piles of pebbles before it. From a distance, high and clear, she heard a strain of bugles from some squad of soldiers going to barracks, or perhaps to the parade-ground, where, she remembered, an Imperial Review of Troops was to be held that morning.

Barbara started suddenly, to see on the lawn just below her window, a figure three feet high, with a round, cropped head, gazing at her from a solemn, inquiring countenance. He wore a much-worn but clean kimono, and his infantile toes clutched the thongs of clogs so large that his feet seemed to be set on spacious wooden platforms. The youngster bent double and staggeringly righted himself with a staccato "O-hayo!"

Barbara gave an inarticulate gasp; in face of his somber dignity she did not dare to laugh. "How do you do?" she said. "Do you live here?"

"No," he replied. "I lives in a other houses."

"Oh!" exclaimed Barbara, aghast at his command of English. "What is your name?"

"Ishikichi," he said succinctly.

"And will you tell me what you are doing, Ishikichi?"

A small hand from behind his back produced a tiny bamboo cage in which was a bell-cricket. As he held it out, the insect chirped like an elfin cymbal. "Find more one," he said laconically.

"And what shall you do with them, I wonder."

He took one foot from its clog and wriggled bare toes in the grass. "Give him to new little sister," he said.

"So you have a new little sister!" exclaimed Barbara. "How fine that must be!"

A glaze of something like disappointment spread over the diminutive face. "Small like," he said. "More better want a brother to play with me."

"Maybe you might exchange her for a brother," she hazarded, but the cropped head shook despondently:

"I think no can now," he said. "We have use her four days."

Barbara laughed outright, a peal of silvery sound that echoed across the garden—then suddenly drew back. A man on horseback was passing across the drive toward the main gate of the compound. It was Daunt, bareheaded, his handsome tanned face flushed with exercise, the breeze ruffling his moist, curling hair. She flashed him a smile as his riding-crop flew to his brow in salute. The sun glinted from its Damascene handle, wrought into the long, grotesque muzzle of a fox. Between the edges of the blue silk curtains she saw him turn in the saddle to look back before he disappeared.

She stood peering out a long time toward the low white cottage across the clipped lawn. The laughter had left her eyes, and gradually over her face grew a wave of rich color. She dropped the curtain and caught her hands to her cheeks. For an instant she had seemed to feel the pressure of strong arms, the touch of coarse tweed vividly reminiscent of a pipe.

What had come over her? The one day that had dawned at sea in golden fire and died in crimson and purple over a file of convicts—the dreaming night with its temple bell striking through silver mist and violet shadows—these had left her the same Barbara that she had always been. But somewhere, somehow, in the closed gulf between the then and now, something new and strange and sweet had waked in her—something that the sound of a voice in the garish sunlight had started into clamorous reverberations.

She sat down suddenly and hid her face.