Riding with Patricia in the big victoria next day, its red-striped runner diving ahead, Barbara forgot her vague wonder at Haru's disappearance, as she felt the enchanted mystery of Tokyo creep further into her heart. They threaded the softly dreaming silence of the willow-bordered moat that clasps the Imperial grounds with a girdle of cloudy emerald, where the "Dragon Pines" of the great Shogun Iyemits fling their craggy masses of olive-green down over the leaning walls to kiss the mirroring water—past many-roofed, Tartar-like watch-towers, cream-white on the blue, and through little parks with forests of thin straight-boled trees and placid lotos ponds seething with the dagger-blue flashings of dragon-flies, all woven together into a tapestry, lovely, remote, fantastic—like the projection of some dream-legend whose people lived a fairy story in a picture-book world.

On this oriental background continually appeared quaint touches of the foreign and bizarre: a huge American straw hat, much befrilled and befeathered, on the head of a baby strapped to its mother's back, or a hideous boa of chenille like bunched caterpillars marring the delicate native neckwear of an exquisite kimono.

On the slope of a hill they came on a motley crowd, which included a sprinkling of foreigners, gathered before the entrance of a temple yard, where a rough, improvised amphitheater had been erected. Patricia called to the driver, and he pulled up.

"Fire-walk," said the betto. "OntakÉ temple."

From their elevated seat they could see white-robed and barefooted priests waving long-handled fans and wands topped with shaggy paper tassels over an area of red-hot cinders. Presently some of them strode calmly across the smoking mass.

"They call that the 'Miracle of Kudan Hill,'" said Patricia. "They are making incantations to the god of water to come and drive out the god of fire. It's a Shinto rite."

A laugh rose from the spectators. The High Priest was inviting the foreigners to attempt the ordeal.

"Look!" said Patricia. "There is the man who got the free lecture out of your uncle on the train—the man with the white waistcoat and the red beard. And there's 'Martha,' too. I do believe she's going to try it!"

She was. Undeterred by the misgivings of the rest, the lady of the painted muslin calmly divested herself of shoes and stockings and marched across and back again. "There!" she said triumphantly. "I said I would, and I did! It may be a miracle, but my feet are simply frying!"

The carriage rolled on across a section of busy trade. From a side street came the brassy blare of a phonograph.

"What a baffling combination it is!" said Barbara. "Last night some of those people were at Mukojima, listening to dead little drums and squealing fifes, and to-night here is Damrosch and the Intermezzo."

"The other day when I passed," said Patricia, "it was Waltz Me Around Again, Willie, and forty children were prancing to it. Martha's husband is 'in' phonographs, by the way. She told me all about it at the Review. He's making a set of Japanese records—geisha songs and native orchestra pieces and even street-noises—to copyright at home."

Presently the horses stopped before a great gate of unpainted cedar, roofed with black and white tiles and bossed with nails of hammered copper. Above it two pine-trees writhed like a DorÉ print. "One of the Empress' ladies-in-waiting lives here," Patricia said. "I'll walk home and on the way I can leave some 'call-tickets'—Tucker's name for visiting-cards. Give my love to the bishop."

She looked wistfully after Barbara as the latter bowled away toward Ts'kiji and her uncle's. Under her flyaway spirits Patricia had the warmest little heart in the world, loyal to its last beat to those she liked. Daunt was decidedly in this category. Like the rest, she had been weaving a cheerful little romance for these two friends. Since the evening at the Cherry-Moon, however, when the newly arrived yacht had been talked of, she had had misgivings. Yesterday, too, Barbara, while confiding nothing, had told her of Austen Ware's coming. Patricia walked up the driveway slowly and with a puzzled frown.

But the girl driving on under cherry-stained sky and cherry-scented winds, knew, that one hour, no problems. She was full of the flame and pulse of youth, of a new nascent tenderness and a warm sense of loving all the world. She asked herself if she could really be the poised, self-contained girl who a few weeks ago sailed for the Orient. Some magic alchemy had transmuted all her elements. New emotions dominated her, and through the beauty before her gaze went flashing more beautiful thoughts that linked with the future.

In her pocket was a letter. It had been brought to her that morning when she woke and she had read it over and over, kneeling in the drift of pillows, her red-gold hair draping her white shoulders, thrilling, murmuring little inarticulate answers to its phrases, looking up now and then to peer through the bamboo sudarÉ to the white and green cottage across the lawn. He would not see her to-day—until evening. Then he would ask her....

As the carriage bore her on, she whispered again and again one of the sentences he had written: "There has never been another woman to me, Barbara. There never will be! My Lady of the Many-Colored Fires!"