“Bud speag to me as before! Touch me wiz those hands—those lips! Adoringly look upon me! My honorable heart and body are cold. Condescend to warm them!”

She had followed him down a declivity, unmindful of the students who pressed with their grave, wondering young faces closely about her.

She could not understand why now no longer she might travel beside him, his sheltering arm supporting her; why she might not even take his hand, or rest her wet cheek against his sleeve. In the three days they had been upon the journey back to Fukui, he had seemed to avoid her, almost as if he feared her.

Once he tried to explain, stupidly, and with a forced coldness.

Things were very different now. When alone, they were like lost children and the silent woods and mountains had put strange dreams and fancies into their heads, so that they had wandered along in a blind, gilded delirium. Now they had awakened. They must go back to the city, where they would be like other people, and where, shortly, their ways must separate. It was for her good. She would understand some day.

She must forget the mountain days, or think of them only as a dream that had vanished, as she herself had predicted it would, like the mist.

She was very stupid, very stubborn, pathetically dense. She did not wish their paths to separate—she would not have it so. No, though they tore her from him by force. She would return to him. Did he not recall the words he had spoken when he declared the dream would never end unless she wished it. She did not wish it. She never would. Patiently, persistently she entreated him, until he was beside himself and felt his strength of mind weakening, and in desperation turned to his students for help. He bade them explain to her more clearly than he could do the new life she was soon to lead—of the change in fortunes that had come to her.

Manfully, but in the bungling, uncertain language of boys they tried to obey him. The unfortunate one, as unconsciously they called her, was soon to see, promised the gentle Junzo. There was to be an honorable operation upon her eyes. These western wizards of science, said the Japanese student, had given sight to hundreds in their own land. The Tojin, himself once a doctor, had diagnosed her trouble as an invisible cataract of a congenital nature, not uncommon nor difficult of removal. He had sent for a great and eminent surgeon who was sojourning in the capital. He had come all the way to Fukui, at the bidding of the Tojin. He was a miracle-worker, whose fame encircled the globe, said the boy with a kindling eye.

A hundred friends awaited her in Tokio, so Higo courteously informed her. They were eager and anxious to receive her—Japanese as well as foreigners. To them Tama was to be sent; for Fukui had been unkind to her, and she would be happier away from it. She would understand by-and-by, they promised her.

She listened patiently, but densely, as if what they told her but half reached her understanding. That she was to be sent away into some distant country—very far from the Temple Tokiwa and Atago Yama—an immeasurable distance away from the Tojin-san—this alone she comprehended.

Her mother had taught her that the life of a Buddhist nun must be one long act of expiation for sins and faults committed in some former state. She tried dazedly to conceive of the terrible crimes of which she must have once been guilty that now she was to be punished so dreadfully; and she reached out blindly for the only comfort possible for her in the world now—the voice, the touch of the Tojin-san, who had held her in his arms!

They travelled by the public roads of the mountain that she had so carefully avoided. They passed the nights as guests of the priests of the mountain temples, who read the letters of the Prince of Echizen, which the students proudly exhibited, and with courteous and profound obeisances welcomed the travellers, even regarding the fox-woman with eyes that were more speculative than resentful. Perhaps they alone of Echizen had best understood this little creature who had lived among them, yet beyond their pale, for so long; for though they had not sought her, neither had they persecuted her, as they could readily have done. Indeed for years she had practically subsisted upon the food she surreptitiously obtained from the temples—some of which was unostentatiously placed as if prepared for her.

The journey back to Fukui was long and tortuous. Summer was gone completely. The days were cold; wind and rain came about them and drove them constantly into refuges of one sort and another; but after many days they came at last to the foot-hills of the mountains, passed through these into the pine woods, through bamboo groves and camphor groves, till they came to the Winged Foot River, which brought them to their destination.