They walked together around the curving road, leaving Haru with the tea-basket. "Patsy would have come," Barbara had said, "but she is in the clutches of her dressmaker." And Daunt had answered, "I have a distinct regard for that Chinaman!"

His black mood had vanished, and the leering imps had flown. In the brightness of her physical presence, how baseless and foolish seemed his sullen imaginings! What man who owned a steam yacht, knowing her, would not wish to name it the Barbara? Walking beside her, so near that he could feel the touch of her light skirt against his ankles, it seemed impossible that he should ever again be other than light-hearted. She was no acquaintance of hours, after all. He had known her for seven years. He was in wild spirits.

The sky was duller now. Its marvelous haze of blue and gold had turned pallid, and the sun glared with a pale, yellowish effrontery. A strange sighing was in the air, so faint, however, that it seemed only the stirring of innumerable leaves, the resinous rasping of pine-needles and the lisping fall of the flaming petals from the century-old camelia trees, that stained the ground with hot, bleeding red. Far below in the shallow pools, nut-brown, bare-legged girls were gathering seaweed in hand-nets, kimono tucked beneath their belts and scarlet petticoats falling to their knees, like a flock of brilliant flamingos. At a turn in the road stood a stone image of Jizo, with a red paper bib about its neck. Before it lay three small rice-cakes; somewhere in the neighborhood was a little sick child, three years old. At its base were heaps of tiny stones, piled by mothers whose little children had died.

They stopped at a tea-house open on all sides, and, sitting cross-legged on its tatamÉ, drank tea from earthenware pots that held only a small cupful, while they listened to a street minstrel beating on a tom-tom, and singing a mysterious song that seemed about to choke him. They fed a crisp rice-cake to a baby sagging from an urchin's shoulder. A doll was strapped to the baby's back. They peered into a Buddhist temple where a monotonous chant came from behind a blue-figured curtain. They went, laughing like two children, down the zigzag stone steps, past innumerable uomitei—crimson-benched "resting-houses," where grave Japanese pedestrians sat eating stewed eels and chipping hard-boiled eggs—to the rocky edge of the tide, which now rolled in with a measured, sullen booming. He pointed to a gloomy fissure which ran into the mountain, at a little distance.

"O Maiden, journeying to Holy Ben-ten," he said, "behold her shrine!"

"How disillusioning!"

"People find love so, sometimes."

She slowly shook her head. "Not all of them," she said softly. "I am old-fashioned enough not to believe that." Her brown eyes were wistful and a little troubled, and her voice was so adorable that he could have gone on his knees to her.

"We will ask Ben-ten about it," he said.

"Oh, but not 'we!'" she cried. "I must go alone. Don't you know the legend? People quarrel if they go together."

"I can't imagine quarreling with you. I'd rather quarrel with myself."

"That would be difficult, wouldn't it?"

"Not in some of my moods. Ask my head-boy. to-day, for instance—"

"Well?" For he had paused.

"I was meditating self-destruction when I met you."

"By what interesting method, I wonder?"

"I was about to search for a volcano to jump into."

"I thought the nearest active crater is a hundred miles away."

"So it is, but I'm an absent-minded beggar."

She laughed. "May I ask what inspired to-day's suicidal mood?"

"It was—a telegram."

"Oh!" She colored faintly. "I—I hope it held no bad news."

He looked into her eyes. "I hope not," he said. Something else was on his tongue, when "Look!" she exclaimed. "How strange the sea looks off there!"

A sinister, whitish bank, like a mad drift of smoke, lay far off on the water, and a tense, whistling hum came from the upper air. A drop of water splashed on Daunt's wrist. "There's going to be a blow," he said. "The seaweed gatherers are all coming in, too. Ben-ten will have to wait, I'm afraid. See—even her High Priest is forsaking her!"

From where they stood steps were roughly hewn into the rock, winding across the face of the cliff. Beside these, stone pillars were socketed, carrying an iron chain that hung in rusted festoons. Along this precarious pathway from the cavern an old man was hastily coming, followed by a boy with a sagging bundle tied in a white cloth. "That parcel, no doubt," said Daunt, "contains the day's offerings. Wait! You're not going?" For she had started down the steps.

She had turned to answer, when, with the suddenness of an explosion, a burst of wind fell on them like a flapping weight, spattering them with drops that struck the rock as if hurled from a sling-full of melted metal. Barbara had never in her life experienced anything like its ferocity. It both startled and angered her, like a personal affront.

Daunt had sprung to her side and was shouting something. But the words were indistinguishable; she shook her head and went on stubbornly, clinging to the chain, a whirl of blown garments. She felt him grasp her arm.

"Go back!" she shrieked. "It's—bad—luck!"

As he released her there came a second's menacing lull, and in it she sprang down the steps and ran swiftly out along the pathway. He was after her in an instant, overtaking her on a frail board trestle that spanned a pool, where the cliff was perpendicular. Here the wind, shaggy with spume, hurled them together. Daunt threw an arm about her, clinging with the other hand to the wooden railing. Her hair was a reddish swirl across his shoulder and her breath, panting against his throat, ridged his skin with a creeping delight. The rocks beneath them, through whose fissures tongues of water ran screaming, was the color of raspberries and tawny with seaweed. There was only a weird, yellow half-light, through which the gale howled and scuffled, like dragons fighting. A slather of wave licked the palsied framework.

He bent and shouted into her ear. All she caught was: "Must—cave—next lull—"

She nodded her head and her lips smiled at him through the confused obscurity. A thrill swept her like silver rain. Pulse on pulse, an emotion like fire and snow in one thrilled and chilled her. She closed her eyes with a wild longing that the wind might last for ever, that that moment, like the ecstasy of an opium dream, might draw itself out to infinite length. Slowly she felt the breath of the tempest ebb about them, then suddenly felt herself lifted from her feet, and her eyes opened into Daunt's. Her cheek lay against his breast, as it had done in that short moment in the Embassy garden. She could feel his heart bound under the rough tweed. Once more the wind caught them, but he staggered through it, and into the high, rock entrance of the cave.

Inside its dripping rim the sudden cessation of the wind seemed almost uncanny, and the boom of the surf was a dull thunderous roar. He set her on her feet on the damp rock and laughed wildly.

"Do you realize," she said, "that we have transgressed the most sacred tenet of Ben-ten by coming here together? We are doomed to misunderstanding!"

"Now that I recollect, that applies only to lovers," he answered. "Then we—"

"Are quite safe," she quickly finished for him. "Come, I want to see the shrine. We must find a candle."

He peered into the gloomy depths. "I think I see some burning," he said. "We will explore."

A little way inside they came to a small well, with a dipper and a rack of thin blue-and-white towels to cleanse the hands of worshipers. On a square pedestal stood a stone Buddha, curiously incrusted by drippings from the roof. Near it was a wooden booth, its front hung with pendents of twisted rice-straw and strips of white paper folded in diagonal notches. It held a number of tiny wooden torii strung with lighted candles, above each of which was nailed a paper prayer. A few copper coins lay scattered beneath them. Daunt thrust two of the candles into wooden holders and they slowly followed the narrowing fissure, guttered by the feet of centuries, between square posts bearing carven texts, and small images, coated with the spermy droppings from innumerable candles.

She held up her winking light toward his face. "What a desperate absorption!" she said laughingly. "You haven't said a thing for five minutes."

"I'm thinking we had better explain at once to Ben-ten that we're not lovers. Otherwise we may get the penalty. Perhaps we'd better just tell her it was an accident, and let it go at that? What do you think?"

"That might be the simplest."

"All right then, I'll say 'Ben-ten, dear, she wanted to come alone; she really did! We didn't intend it at all. So be a nice, gracious goddess and don't make her quarrel with me!'"

"What do you suppose she will answer?"

"She will say: 'Young man, in the same circumstances, I should have done exactly the same myself.'"

The passage had grown so low that they had to bend their heads, then all at once it widened into a concave chamber. The cannonading of the wind rumbled fainter and fainter. He took her hand and drew her forward. "There is Ben-ten," he said.

The Goddess of Love sat in a barred cleft of the rock, enshrined in a dull, gold silence. Beads of moisture spangled her robe, glistening like brilliants through the mossy darkness. "Poor deity!" said Barbara. "To have to live for ever in a sea-cavern! It's a clammy idea, isn't it?"

"That's—" He paused. "I could make a terrible pun, but I won't."

"One shouldn't joke about love," she said.

"Have you discovered that too?"

She gazed at him strangely, without answering. In the wan light his face looked pale. Her unresisting fingers still lay in his; he felt their touch like a breath of fire through all his veins. Her eyes sparkled back the eery witch-glow of the candle-flames. "You are a green-golden gnome-girl!" he said unsteadily. "And I am under a spell."

"Yes, yes," she said. "I am Rumptydudget's daughter! I have only to wave my candlestick—so!—to turn you into a stalagmite!"

She suited the action to the word—and dropped her candle, which was instantly extinguished on the damp floor. Bending forward to retrieve it, Daunt slipped. The arm he instinctively threw out to save himself struck the wall and his own candle flew from its socket. As he regained his footing, confused by the blank, enfolding darkness, he stumbled against Barbara, and his face brushed hers. In another instant the touch had thrilled into a kiss.

A moment she lay in his arms, passive, panting, her unkissed mouth stinging with the burn of his lips. The world was a dense blackness, shot with fire and full of pealing bells, and the beating of her heart was a great wave of sound that throbbed like the iron-shod fury of the seas.

"I love you, Barbara!" he said simply. "I love you!"

The stammering utterance pierced the swift, confused sweetness of that first kiss like a lance of desperate gladness. Through the tumbling passion of the words he poured into her heart, she could feel his hands touching her face, her throat, her loosened hair.

"Barbara! Listen, dear! I must say it! It's stronger than I am—no, don't push me away! Love me! You must love me!

With her arms on his breast, she had made a movement to release herself. "We are mad, I think!" she breathed.

"Then may we never be sane!"

"I—you have known me only two days! What—"

"Ah, no! I've known you all these years and have been loving you without really knowing it. I made a woman out of my own fancy, that I dreamed alive. In the long winter evenings when I worked at my models in the little house in Aoyama, I used to see her face in my driftwood blaze and talk to her. I called her my 'Lady of the Many-Colored Fires.' I never thought she really existed, but that first night in the Embassy garden I knew that my dream-woman was you!—you, Barbara!"

Her hands pushed him from her no more. They fell to trembling on his breast. In the dense, salty obscurity, she turned her head sharply, to feel again his lips on hers, her own molding to his kiss. She drooped, swaying, stunned, breathless.

"Barbara, I love you!"

"No—not again. Light—the candle."

"Just a moment longer—here in the dark, with Ben-ten. It's fate, darling! Why should I have been in Japan and not in Persia when you came? Why did I happen to be there in the garden that night, at that particular moment? Why, it was the purest accident that I came here to-day! No—not accident. It was kismet! Barbara!"

"Make—a light. I—beg you!"

His lips were murmuring against her cheek. "Say 'I love you,' too!"

"I—can not. You ... you would hold me cheap ... I would be—I am!... What? Yes, it was a tulip tree. I was sixteen.... Oh, you couldn't have—why, you'd forgotten the whole thing! You had, you had!... Don't hold me.... No, I don't care what you think!... Yes, I do care!... Yes, I—I ... This is perfectly shameless!... Dark? That makes it all the worse. What will you ... No, no! You must not kiss me again! We must go back!—I will go back...."

She freed herself, and he fumbled for his fallen candle. He struck a match. The sputtering blue flame lit her white, languorous face, her fallen hair, her heaving breast. It went out. He struck another and the wick blazed up.

"Look at me, dear!" he said. "Tell me in the light. Will you marry me?"

"I can not answer—now."

"Why? Don't you love me?"

"I—in so short a time, how could I? Let us go now. I don't know myself—nor—nor you!"

She was trembling, and he noted it with a pang of compunction.

"To-morrow, sweetheart? Will you give me my answer then?"

"Yes!" It was almost inaudible.

"At the Foreign Minister's ball to-morrow night? I'll come to you there, dearest. I—"

He stopped. She had caught her hand to her throat with a wild gesture. "Ben-ten! She—she is frowning at us! There—look there!"

"My poor darling!" he said. "You are nervous. See, it was only the shadow! I ought not to have brought you into this dismal hole! You are positively shivering."

"Let us hurry," she said, and they went quickly into the warmer air and light of the entrance.

The squall had passed with the fateful swiftness of its coming. The waves still gurgled and tumbled, but the fury of the wind was over. The murk light had lifted, showing the wet sky a patchy drab, which again was beginning to show glimpses of golden hue.

They walked back to Haru at the tea-house, beneath the wild, poignant beauty of disheveled cryptomeria, echoing once more the eternal song of the semi—along paths strewn with drenched petals and sweet with the moist scents of sodden leaves—then together, down the steep, templed hill and across the planked walk to the mainland, where a trolley buzzed through the springing rice-fields, musical now with the mÉ kayui—mÉ kayui of the frogs. Daunt accompanied them to the through line of the railway. From there he was to return to Kamakura for the answer to his letter.

The sun was setting when the Tokyo express pulled into the station. As Haru disappeared into the compartment, Daunt took Barbara's hand to help her to the platform. There had been no other first-class passengers to embark and the forward end of the asphalt was deserted. Her lovely, flushed face was turned toward him, and there in the dusk of the station, he bent swiftly and kissed her once more on the lips.

"Dearest, dearest!" he said behind his teeth, and turned quickly away.

In the car, as the train fled through the glory of the sunset, Barbara closed her eyes, the longer to keep the impression of that eager gaze: the lithe, muscular poise of the strong frame, the parted lips, the brown hair curling under the peak of the cloth cap. She tried to imagine him on his backward journey. Now the trolley had passed the rice-fields, now he was striding along the shore road toward Kamakura, where the great bronze Buddha was lifting its face of dreamless calm. Now, perhaps, he was turning back toward the deepening blur of the green island. She shivered a little as she remembered the frown that had seemed to rest on the stony countenance of Ben-ten in her cave.

Her thought drifted into to-morrow, when she was to give him her answer. Ah, she knew what that answer would be! She thought of the telegram of the night before, which she had read in the candle-lighted street! To-morrow Ware also was coming—for an answer! She knew what that would be, too. She felt a sudden pity for him. Yet she knew now—what wisdom she had gained in these two swift days!—that his was not the love that most deserved it. Daunt's parting kiss clung to her lips like a living flower. The hand he had clasped still burned to his touch; she lifted it and held it against her hot face, while the darkening carriage seemed to fill with the dank smell of salty wind and seaweed, mingled with his voice:

"Barbara, I love you!—Dearest! Dearest!"

She thought the gesture unseen, unguessed by any one. But in the forward car, beyond the glass vestibule door, which to her was only a trembling mirror, a man sat watching with burning eyes. He had been gazing through the window when the train stopped, had risen to his feet with instant recognition—to shrink back into his seat, his fingers clenched, his bitten lip indrawn, and a pallor on his face.

It was Austen Ware, and he had seen that kiss.