The three-storied front of the Cherry-Moon Tea-House, when Daunt's party arrived, was glowing with tiers of large round lanterns of oiled-paper bearing a conventionalized moon and cherry-blossoms. At the door sat rows of little velvet-lined sandals. Here shoes were discarded, and servants drew on the guests' feet loose slippers of cotton cloth, soft and yielding. One other guest was awaiting the party at the entrance. This was Captain Viscount Sakai, of the General Staff, spruce, fine-featured and in immaculate European evening dress. He had a clear, olive complexion, and, save for the narrow, Japanese eye, might have been a Spaniard.

The small second-story shokudo in which they dined was floored in soft tatamÉ edged with black and laid in close-fitting geometrical pattern. Save for a plain alcove at one end, holding a dwarf pine and a single nanten branch with clusters of bright red berries, it was empty. There was no drapery. The walls were sliding screens of gold-leaf on which were finely drawn etchings of pine-trees covered with snow, the effect suggested rather than finished. It was brilliant with electric light.

Tiny square tables of black lacquer were disposed along three sides of the room, one for each guest. They were but four inches high and on the floor behind each lay a thin, flat zabuton or cushion of brocade. The bowing geisha in wonderful rainbow kimono who awaited them might have stepped from the temple stage at Mukojima. These pointed to the tables with inviting smiles:

"Plee shee down!" they said in unison.

"I never could 'shee down' gracefully when any one is looking!" complained Patricia, as she tucked her small feet under her on the kneeling-cushion.

"Banzai!" commented Voynich, setting his monocle. "You have practised before a mirror!" He collapsed beside her with a groan. "I shall be reincarnated an accordion!"

"Count," said Patricia plaintively, "no bouquets, please. I know when you are stringing me."

He looked blank and the Japanese officer hastily produced a lavender note-book and a gold pencil. "That is a new one," he said. "I must—what is it?—ah yes! I must nail it. Excuse me. I write it in my swear-album."

"The Viscount is learning American slang," Patricia informed Barbara. "One of these days you must tell him some of the very latest."

He looked across with gravely twinkling eyes. "I shall be—ah—tickle to die!" he said. "It is my specialty. Nex' year I become Professor in Slang Literature at the Imperial University."

The meal began merrily. Barbara sat on Daunt's left, with one of the attachÉs next her. Baroness Stroloff was on Daunt's other hand. Barbara remembered it afterward as a meal of elfish daintiness—of warm, pungent, wine-like liquor in blue porcelain bottles, of food of strange look and cloying taste, highly colored and seasoned, in a hundred tiny red and black lacquer dishes that carried her back to her doll-days, with covers patterned in gold, served by prostrating geisha whose kimono were woven with violet Fujis, winged dragons and marvelous exotic blossoms.

Daunt pointed to a dish which had just been set before her. "You must try the hasu-no-renkon," he said. "That's cooked lotos-root. It's nearly as good as it looks."

"How do you ever remember the names!"

"Oh, it's quite easy to talk Japanese," he replied recklessly. "There are only fifty syllables in the language, and any way you string them together it means something or other. It doesn't matter whether it's the right thing or not, if you just bow and smile. There are seventeen ways of drawing in your breath which are a lot more important than what you say!"

"What disgraceful nonsense! What is that pink thing?"

"Raw bonito. The refuge of dyspeptics. Voynich, over there, eats nothing else at home, they say. The variegated compound is kuchitori. It's made of sugared chestnuts, leeks and pickled fish. May I compliment you on the way you handle your chopsticks? At my first Japanese dinner I bit one in two. Isn't Baroness Stroloff stunning, by the way!"

The latter was deep in discussion with Patricia, moving her hands in quick, vivacious gestures which clusters of opals made into flashes of blue fire. "But you must send to Hakodate for your furs," she was saying. "I will give you the address of my man there. You should get them now, not wait till fall, when the tourists have bought all the best."

"I'm dying for an ermine stole."

"Oh, my dear, not ermine! Get sables. One can be so insulting in sables!"

Barbara laughed with the rest. "What a nice lot you are," she said, "all knowing each other, all friendly. I thought diplomatists were always poring over international law books and drawing up musty treaties."

"It's not all cakes and ale," he asserted. "I worked till three this morning on a cipher telegram."

"After the melodrama?"

"Ah, it was opera!" he protested. "It has left me memories of only flowers, and scents and music!"

"You made most of the music, if I remember rightly."

"How unkind! I could no more help it than fly."

"On your Glider?"

He laughed again. "Don't forget what is to happen one day with that same machine."

"What is that?"

"I am to swoop down and carry you off. It was your own suggestion, you know."

"But it was to be at the Imperial Review. That doesn't happen again for a year."

"I won't wait that long!"

She turned her head; her eyes sparkled in the caught light. Her fingers were fluttering a square of red paper that had been rolled about her chopsticks. On it was a line of tiny characters. "What is that writing?"

"That is a love-poem," he answered. "You know a Japanese poem has only thirty-one syllables. You find them everywhere and on everything, from a screen to a fire-shovel. I've seen them printed on tooth-picks. Your huckster composes them as he brings the fish from market, and your amah writes them at night by a firefly lantern."

"Can you read it?"

He translated: "I thought my love's long hair drooped down from the gate of the sky. But it was only the shadow of evening."

"How delicately pretty!" she exclaimed. "It's written in kana, the sound-alphabet, isn't it?"

"Yes. How much you have learned already!"

"Haru has begun teaching me. Let me show you my proficiency." She took his pencil and wrote:

???

"There! who would guess that was Japanese for 'Daunt.' And what an impression you must have made on Haru for her to select your name as my first lesson!"

Across the soft shoo-shoo of spotless, tabi-clad feet, the flitting of bright-hued kimono, the gay badinage that flew about the low tables, Daunt felt her beauty thrill him from head to foot like a garment of mist and fire. As she dropped her hand to the cushion it had touched his, and for an instant their pulses had seemed to throb into one. The tiny, lacquered cup she took up trembled in her fingers.

She started when the young army officer nearest her said: "Speaking of sailing, give me a steam-yacht like the one that berthed yesterday at Yokohama. She belongs to a man named Ware—Austen Ware—a New Yorker, I understand. Perhaps you know him, Miss Fairfax."

"I have met him," she answered.

The young army officer looked up quickly—he was an enthusiastic yachtsman. "A beautiful vessel!" he said. "I noticed her to-day, but she was too far away to make out her name."

"It is the Barbara," said Voynich.

"Why—" exclaimed Patricia, "that's—" She bit her tongue, caught by something in Barbara's face. "Good gracious!" she ended. "My—my foot's asleep!"

Barbara had felt her flush fading to paleness. She felt a quick relief that none there, save Patricia and Daunt, knew her first name. In the diversion caused by Patricia's helpless efforts to stand up, she stole a glance at Daunt.

A shadow had fallen on his face. He did not look at her, but in his brain the yacht's name was ringing like a knell. She knew Phil's brother! Austen Ware's yacht had arrived in Yokohama on the same day as her ship. And it was named the Barbara. Yet to-night he had dreamed—what had he been dreaming? These thoughts mixed themselves weirdly with the gaiety and nonsense that he forced himself to render.

Barbara felt this with an aching sense of resentment. What was he thinking of her? And why should she care so fiercely? The courses passed, but the lightness and blitheness of the scene were somehow chilled. The decorative food: the numberless, tiny cups and trays; the taper, pink-tinted fingers that poured the warm drink; the kimono, the music and lights,—all palled.

She was glad when the Baroness decreed the dinner over by repeating Patricia's experiment of painful unfolding, and calling for her wraps.