The Ambassador, standing by the mantel, looked thoughtfully at his wife. She sat in a big wicker chair, in a soft dressing-gown, her hands clasped over one knee in a pose very pretty and girlish.

"Come!" he said good-humoredly. "You women are always imagining romances and broken hearts. Why, Barbara and Daunt haven't known each other long enough to fall in love."

She looked at him quizzically. "Do you remember how long we had known each other when you—"

"Pshaw!" he retorted. "That's just like a woman. She never can argue without coming to personalities. Besides, there never was another girl like you, my dear—I couldn't afford to take any chances."

"Away with your blarney, Ned! You know I'm right, though you won't admit it."

"Of course I won't. Daunt's not a woman's man. He never was. He's been getting along pretty well with Barbara, no doubt. But this man she's going to marry she's known for a year. The bishop told me about him the day after they landed. He thought she was practically engaged to him then."

"'Practically!'" she commented with gentle scorn. "Are girls who have been properly brought up ever 'practically' engaged, and not fully so? She may have expected to marry him, and yet if I ever saw a girl in love—and, oh, Ned, remember that I understand what that means!—she was in love with Daunt yesterday. We women see more than men and feel more. Patsy saw it too. She's feeling badly about it, poor child, I think."

"Nonsense!" the ambassador sniffed. "There isn't a shred of evidence. Barbara's not a flirt in the first place, and, if she were, Daunt can take care of himself."

"He came to your study, didn't he, after the ball? I thought I heard his voice in the hall."

"Yes," he answered.

"How did he look?"

"Well," he said hesitatingly, "he was a bit off color, I thought. I told him to take a few days off and run up to Chuzenji."

"Is he going?"

"Yes. He's leaving early in the morning. But don't get it into your sympathetic little head that it has the slightest thing to do with Barbara. The idea's quite absurd. He's never thought of such a thing as falling in love with her!"

"Don't you think a woman knows about these things?"

"When she's told. And Barbara has told you, hasn't she?"

"That she is going to marry Mr. Ware. Yes."

"Well, what more do you want?"

She shook her head. "Only for her to be happy!" she said tremulously. "I've never known a girl who has grown so into my heart, Ned. I feel almost as though she were Patsy's sister. She has no mother of her own—no one to advise her. And yet—I—somehow I couldn't talk about it to her. I tried. She doesn't want to. It seemed almost as if she were afraid."

"Afraid?"

"Of doing something else. As if she were going into this marriage as a refuge. I don't know just why I felt that, but I did. She was so very pale, so very quiet and contained. It didn't seem quite natural. It made me think of Pamela Langham. You remember her? She was in love with a man who—well, whom she found she couldn't marry. He wasn't the right sort. I suppose she was afraid she would marry him anyway if she waited. So she married another man at once—a man who had been in love with her for years. We were just the same age and she told me all about it at the time. To-night when Barbara told me she had promised to marry this Mr. Ware—and soon, Ned!—I seemed to see poor little dead Pamela looking at me with her pale face and big, deep eyes."

She turned her head and furtively wiped her eyes. "If I could only be sure!" she said. "But I think how I should feel—if it were Patsy, Ned!"

And while they talked, Barbara lay in her blue-and-white room, wide-eyed in the dark. The smiling, ball-room mask had slipped from her face and left it strained and white. She had drawn the curtain and shut out the misty glory of the garden—and the small white cottage across the scented lawn.

In those few agonized hours of the afternoon, while she had lain there thrilling with suffering, something deep within her had seemed to fail—as though a newly-lighted flame, white and pure, had fallen and died. Where it had gleamed remained only a painful twilight. It had been a different Barbara that had emerged. The fairest fabric of those Japanese days had crashed into the dust, and in the echo of its fall she stood anchorless, in terror of herself and of the future. The harbor of convention alone seemed to offer safety—and at the harbor entrance waited Austen Ware. At the ball the die had been cast.

Outside the window she could hear the rasp of the pine-branches and the sleepy "korup! korup!" of a pigeon. A tiny night-lamp was on the stand beside her. Its gleam lit vaguely the golden Buddha on the Sendai chest. Its face now seemed cold and blank and cruel, and in its dim light, on the shadowy wall, sharp detached pictures etched themselves. She saw herself looking at Austen Ware's yacht, set in that wonderful, warm, orient bay—a swift, white monitor, watching her! She saw a yellow rank of convicts filing into the yawning mouth of Shimbashi Station—like the long, drab years of savorless lives! She saw the great white plaster figure over the entrance-arch of the Yoshiwara—beckoning to hollow smiles that covered empty hearts!

Over the thronging pictures grew another—a misty, nightgowned little figure who stood by her, whispering her name. Patricia, after sleepless hours, crept from her bed to Barbara's room, longing for some assurance, she knew not what, some breath of the old girlish confidences to melt the ice that seemed to have congealed between them. And Barbara, with the first phantom of softened feeling she had known that night, took the other into her arms.

But it was she who comforted, whispering words that she knew were empty, caressing the younger girl with a touch that held no tremor, no hint of those anguished visions that had floated through the leaden silences of her soul.

Till at last, Patricia, half-reassured, smiled and fell asleep; while Barbara, her loose gold hair drifting across the pillow, her bare arm nestling the dark, braided head beside her, lay stirless, staring into the shadows, where the pale glimmer of the Buddha floated, a ghostly chiaroscuro.