Through the thin paper pane, parted by his moistened finger, Ware's hot, hollow eyes saw the Japanese girl come into the room. She had not waited to shut the shoji behind her. She drew quick sobbing breaths and her eyes had the desperate look of a hunted animal. She ran into the sleeping apartment and closed its shikiri.

Barbara had halted at the doorway. As she stood looking in, her eyes fell on the mauve kimono with its silver camelias. It was the robe Haru had worn the first evening she came to her. If she had doubted, all doubt was now gone. An instant she hesitated, then, with sudden resolution, knocked on the grill and stepped across the threshold.

The man who watched could not solve the puzzle, but in that instant the sick suspicion he had harbored became a cold and lifeless thing in his breast. A sense of shame rushed through him as he saw her gaze wander about the interior with its veneer of the foreign: to the disordered desk—the lounge and its litter of books—the photograph on the wall—the open panel with its champagne bottles. In her glance distaste had grown to a quick question. The coarse suggestions of the place were welling over her. Whose house was this? Had Haru seen her and was she hiding from her?

Suddenly she saw the man's cap and gauntlet in the corner. Her cheeks rushed into flame. She seemed to see Haru's innocent face smiling at her over the throbbing samisen and through its tones to hear again the echo of a ribald laugh before the gilded cages of the Yoshiwara. Something in her cried out against the inference. All at once she took an abrupt step forward. She was looking at the round glass lantern just outside the doorway, painted with three characters:

???

She chilled as if ether had been poured in her veins. The name they stood for had been her first lesson in Japanese—which Haru had taught her! She snatched up one of the volumes from the chair. It was Lillienthal's Conquest of the Air. She opened it to the title page.

Ware, watching, saw with surprise that she was trembling violently. She had grown pale to the lips. The book slipped from her fingers and crashed on to the tatamÉ. It lay there, open as she had held it, and he saw what was written across the white leaf. It was Daunt's name.

His thought leaped as if at the flick of a lash. Daunt's book! What was she thinking? The piteous pallor that swept her face like an icy wave answered him. Why she was there—her interest in this Japanese girl who fled from her—he could not guess. But it was clear that she had not known the house was Daunt's, and that with the knowledge, she was face to face with what must seem a damning complicity. Perhaps some hint of this retreat had come to her—he knew how gossip feathered its shafts!—some covert allusion, some laughing oui-dire, to which her coming had now given such verity. Phil was the deus ex machina of the situation. His Japanese amour she was now laying at Daunt's door! All this flashed through his mind in an instant. He watched her intently.

Over Barbara was sweeping a hideous chaos of mocking voices, bits of recollection barbed with agony. The little house near Aoyama parade-ground—the carriage had passed the great empty plaza a few moments ago—that he had kept from "sentiment"! The house she had asked him to show her, when he had evaded the request. And Haru! A feeling of physical anguish like that of death came to her; a dull pain was in her temples and the floor seemed to be rising up with her toward the ceiling. Daunt? He whose lips had lain on hers, whose letter was in her bosom—it burned her flesh now like a live coal! "There has never been another woman to me, Barbara. There never will be!" The words seemed to launch themselves from the air, stinging like fiery javelins.

Behind the shikiri, a weird, malevolent clamor was shouting through Ware's brain. He stood alone with his temptation. What had he to do with Daunt, or with her belief in him? She had accepted his own advances, beckoned him half around the world—for what? To discard him for this man whom she had known but a handful of days! Chance had arranged this mise en scÈne. Was he to tell her the truth—and lose her? The key to the situation was in his hand. He had only to keep silence!

At that moment he felt crumble down in some crude gulf within the fabric of his self-esteem—the high-built structure of years. Something colder, formless and malignant, came to sit on its riven foundations. A savage elation grew in him.

Suddenly a shikiri was flung aside. Haru stood there, her face deathly pale, her hands wrenching and tearing at her sleeves. She laughed, a high, gasping, unnatural treble.

"So-o-o, Ojo-San! You come make visiting—nÉ? The shrill voice rang through the silent room. "My new house now, an' mos' bes' master. No more Christian! My bad—oh, ve-ree bad Japan girl!" With another peal of laughter she pointed to the knot of her obi. It was tied in front.

Barbara ran down the garden path as if pursued. She stepped into the carriage blindly. The Fox-Woman! Votary of the Fox-God, at whose candle-lighted shrine she had refused tribute!

This, then, was the end. It came to her like the striking of a great bell. To-morrow the streets would lie as vivid in the sunlight, the buglers would march as blithely, the bent pines would wave, the lotos-pads in the moat glisten, the gorgeous geisha flash by: she alone would know that the sun had died in the blue heaven!

"Home, Taka," she said, and leaned back and closed her eyes.

Behind her Haru's laughter had broken suddenly. She rushed into the little sleeping-room and threw herself on the tatamÉ before the tiny image of Kwan-on, in a wild burst of sobbing.

Ware opened the shikiri softly, and with noiseless step, passed out of the house.