A man passed hastily through the carriage leaving a trail of small pamphlets bound in green paper with gold lettering—an advertisement of a health resort, printed in English for the tourist. Barbara opened one curiously. She looked up with a merry eye.

"Here's a paragraph for you, Uncle Arthur," she said. "Listen:

"'This place has other modern monuments, first and second-class hotels and many sea-scapes. In one quarter are a number of missionaries, but they can easily be avoided.'"

"Do let us credit that to difficulties of the language," he protested. "I'm sure that must have been meant complimentarily."

"But what a contradiction!" put in Patricia wickedly.

"Well," he retorted. "My baker has a sign on his wagon, 'The biggest loafer in Tokyo.' He means that well, too."

A shrill whistle, a slamming of doors, and now the gray roofs fell away. On one side the steel road all but dipped in the bay. Wild ducks drew startled wakes across the rippleless lagoon. On a sand-bar a flock of gray and white gulls disported, looking at a distance like pied bathers; and about an anchored fishing boat, a dozen naked urchins were splashing with shrill cries. Far across the inlet, hazy, vapory, visionary, Barbara could make out a farther shore, an outline in violets and opalines, coifed with lilac cloud, and in the mid-azure a high-pooped junk swam by, a shape of misty gold, palely drawn in wan, blue light.

On the other side the train was rounding grassy hills, terraced to the very tops. Laid against their steep sides, or standing upright on wooden framework, were occasional huge advertisements in red or white—Chinese characters or pictures—while flowering camelia trees and small green-yellow shrubs drew lengthening blue shadows. A high tressle spanned acres of orchard where continuous trellis made a carpet of growing fruit, across which Barbara saw far away the bold outline of bluish hills.

They were crossing flooded rice-fields now, like gigantic crazy checker-boards, and the air was musical with the low, chirring chorus of frogs. Shades of orange light played over the marshes, bars of rape braided them with vivid yellow, and on the narrow, curving partitions between the burnished squares, round stacks of garnered straw stood like crawfish chimneys. Amid them peasants worked with broad-bladed mattocks, knee-deep in mud. They were blue clad, with white cloths bound about their heads, and some had sashes of crimson. Here and there, naked to the thighs, a boy trod a water-wheel between the terraced levels. At intervals a refractory rock-hillock served as excuse for a single twisted pine-tree shading a carved tablet to some Shinto divinity, or a steep bluff sheltered a tiny shrine of unpainted wood; and all along the way, shining canals drew silver ribbons through the paddy-fields, and little arrowy flights of birds darted hither and thither.

Occasionally they passed small, neat stations, each with its white sign-boards bearing long liquid names in English, and queer Japanese characters. Opposite one, on a sloping hill that was a mass of deep glowing green, Patricia pointed out the peaked roofs of a cluster of temples, the shrine of some century-dead Buddhist saint. Barbara began to realize that these fields through which this modern train was gliding were old Japan, that in those blue hills had been nurtured the ancient legends she had read, of famous two-sworded samurai, of swaggering bandits and pleasure-loving shogun, and of tea-house geisha who danced their way into daimyo's palaces. The spell of the land, whose sheer beauty had thrilled her on the ship, drew her closer with the threads of memories almost forgotten.

Its contrasts were wonderful. They spoke of primary and unmixed emotions, that lisped themselves through the fading golden sunlight, the moist, dreamy air, the graceful outlines of roof and tree. In the west the sun was declining toward a range of hills jagged as the teeth of a bear. Their tops were pale as cloud and their bases melted into an ebony line of forest. The plain below was a winey purple, with slashes of red earth gorges like fresh wounds, and one side had the cloudy color of raspberries crushed in curdled milk. The farther range seemed a part of a far-off painted curtain, tinted in pastels, and high above a milky cloud floated, curling like a lace scarf about the opal crest of Fuji, mysteriously blue and dim as an Arctic summer sea.

Barbara glimpsed it, the very spirit of beauty, between the whirling shadows of pine and camphor trees, between tiled walls guarding thatched temples, flights of gray pigeons and spurts of pink cherry-blossom. As she leaned out, and the pines bowed rhythmically, and the water-wheels turned in the furrows, and the yellow-green of the bamboo, the purple-indigo of the hills and the golden-pink of the cherries lifting, above the hedges, went by like raveling skeins of a tapestry—that majestic Presence, ghostly and splendid above the wild contour of hill and mountain, seemed to call to her.

And across the gorgeous landscape, rejoicing from every rift and crevice of its moist soil, in its colors of rich red earth and green foliage, in the grace and vigor of its springing, resilient bamboo groves and the cardinal pride of its flowering camelias, Barbara's heart answered the call.

CHAPTER IV
UNDER THE RED SUNSET

The other got up and took a seat opposite. "You see," he pursued confidentially, "I came on this trip just for a rest and to settle the bills for the curios my wife"—he indicated the lady, who had now moved up beside him—"thinks she'd like to look at back home. But I've been getting interested by the minute. It's quite some time since I went to school, and I guess there hadn't so much happened then to Japan. I wish you'd run down the scale for me—just to hit the high places. Now there was a big rumpus here, I remember, at the time of our Civil War. They chose a new Emperor, didn't they?"

"No. The dynasty has been unbroken for two thousand years."

"Two thousand years!" cried the lady. "Why, that's before Christ!"

"When our ancestors, Martha, were painting themselves up in yellow ochre and carrying clubs—what was the row about, then?"

"It was something like this. To go back a little, the Emperor was always the nominal ruler and spiritual head, but the temporal power was administered by a self-decreed Viceroy called the shogun. Japan was a closed country and only a little trading was allowed in certain ports."

His questioner nodded. The girl beside the white-haired old soldier had touched the latter's sleeve, and both were listening attentively. "Then Perry came along and kicked open the gate. Bombarded 'em, didn't he?"

The bishop's eyes twinkled. "Only with gifts. He brought a small printing-press, a toy telegraph line and a miniature locomotive and railroad track. He set up these on the beach and showed the officials whom the shogun's government sent to treat with him, how they worked. In the end he made them understand the immense value of the scientific advancement of the western world. The visit was an eye-opener, and the wiser Japanese realized that the nation couldn't exist under the old régime any longer. It must make general treaties and adopt new ideas. Some, on the other hand, wanted things to stay as they were."

"Pulling both ways, eh?"

"Yes. At length the progressists decided on a sweeping measure. Under the shogunate, the daimyos (they were the great landed nobles) had been in a continual state of suppressed insurrection."

"Some wouldn't knuckle down to the shogun, I suppose."

"Exactly. There was no national rallying-point. But they all alike revered their Emperor. In all the bloody civil wars of a thousand years—and the Japanese were always fighting, like Europe in the Middle Ages—no shogun ever laid violent hands on the Emperor. He was half divine, you see, descended from the ancient gods, a living link between them and modern men. So now they proposed to give him complete temporal power, make him ruler in fact, and abolish the shogunate entirely."

"Phew! And the big daimyos came into line on the proposition?"

"They poured out their blood and their money like water for the new cause. The shogun himself voluntarily relinquished his power and retired to private life."

"Splendid!" said the stranger, and the girl clapped her gloved hands. "So that was the 'Restoration,' the beginning of Meiji, whatever that may mean?"

"The 'Era of Enlightenment.' The present Emperor, Mutsuhito, was a boy of sixteen then. They brought him here to Yedo, and renamed it Tokyo——"

"And proceeded to get reeling drunk on western notions," said the man with the military button, smiling grimly. "I was out here in the Seventies."

"True, sir," assented the bishop. "It was so, for a time. And the opposition took refuge in riot, assassination, and suicide. But gradually Japan worked the modernization scheme out. She sent her young statesmen to Europe and America to study western systems of education, jurisprudence and art. She hired an army of experts from all over the world. She sent her cleverest lads to foreign universities. In the end she chose what seemed to her the best from all. Her military ideas come from Germany and her railroad cars from the town of Pullman, Illinois. When the best didn't suit her, she invented a system of her own, as she has done with wireless telegraphy."

"So!" said the other. "I'm greatly obliged to you, sir. I've read plenty in the newspapers, but I never had it put so plain. It strikes me," he added to the old soldier, "that a nation plucky enough to do this in fifty years, in fifty more will make some other nations get a move on." He brought a big fist smashing down in an open palm. "And, by gad! the Japanese deserve all they get! When we go back I guess me and Martha won't march in any anti-Jap torch-light processions, anyway!"

The fields were gone now. The train was rumbling along a canal teeming with laden sampan, level with the paper shoji of frail-looking houses on its opposite bank. Beyond lay a sea of roofs, swelling gray billows of tiling spotted with green foam, from which steel factory chimneys lifted like the black masts of sunken ships. A leafy hill of cryptomeria rose near-by, and an octagonal stone tower peeped above its foliage. Crows were circling about it, black dots against the bronze. The train was entering Tokyo.

A door slammed sharply. From the forward smoking carriage a man had entered. He was an European and Barbara was struck at once by his great size and the absence of color in his leaden face. The bored-looking diplomatist in the corner gathered himself hastily into a bow, which the other acknowledged abstractedly. Seemingly he had been occupied in some intent speculation which spread a kind of glaze over his sharp features. A book drooped carelessly from his heavy fingers.

"That is Doctor Bersonin," said the bishop, as the girls collected their wraps. "He came just before I left, last fall. He is the government expert, and is supposed to be one of the greatest living authorities on explosives."

"Oh, yes," said Patricia, "I know. He invented a dynamo or a torpedo, or something. I saw him once at a reception; he had a foreign decoration as big as a dinner-plate."

The big man made his way slowly along the aisle and, still absorbed, took a dust-coat from a rack. As he ponderously drew it on, the daylight was suddenly eclipsed, and the rumbling reëchoed from metal roofing. They were in Shimbashi Station.

"Isn't he simply odious!" whispered Patricia, as the expert stepped before them on to the long, dusky, asphalt platform. "His eyes are like a cat's and his hands look as if they wanted to crawl, like big white spiders! There is the Embassy betto," she said suddenly, pointing over the turnstile, where stood a Japanese boy in a wide-winged kimono of tea-colored pongee with crimson facings and a crimson mushroom hat. "The carriage is just outside. You'll come, too, of course, Bishop," she added. "Father will expect you."

He shook his head and motioned toward a dense assemblage comprising a half dozen of his own race in clerical black, and a half hundred kimono'd Japanese, whose faces seemed one composite smile of welcome. "There is a part of my flock," he said. "There will be a jubilation at my bachelor palace to-night. I shall see you to-morrow, I hope."

They watched him for a moment, the center of a ceremonious ring of bowing figures, then passed through the station to the steps where the carriage waited.

The station debouched on to a broad open square bordered with canals and lined with ranks of rick'sha, some of which had small red flags with the name of a hotel in white letters, in English. The space was gray and dusty; pedestrians dotted it and across it a bent and sweating street-sprinkler hauled his ugly trickling cart, chanting in a half-tone as he went. A little distance away Barbara caught a glimpse of a busy paved street, lined with ambitious glass shop-fronts and with a double line of clanging trolley-cars passing to and fro beneath a maze of telegraph wires seemingly as fine as pack-thread. Her nostrils twitched with strange odors—from stagnant moats of sticky, black mud, from panniers of dressed fish, from the rice-powder and pomade of women's toilets—all the scents bred in swarming streets by a glowing tropic sun.

At one side waited a handful of foreign carriages. All the drivers of these wore the loose, flapping liveries and the round hats of green or crimson or blue. "They are Embassy turn-outs," explained Patricia. "Each one has its color, you see. Ours is red and you can see it farthest." As they took their seats an open victoria rolled up, with cobalt-blue wheels, and a betto with a kimono of dark cloth trimmed with wide strips of the same hue ran ahead, clearing the way with raucous cries. "There goes the Bulgarian Minister's wife," said Patricia. "She's got the finest pearls in Tokyo."

A hundred yards from the entrance the Embassy carriage halted abruptly and Barbara caught her companion's arm with a low exclamation. At the side of the square, seated or reclining on the ground was a body of perhaps eighty men dressed in a deadly brownish-yellow, the hue of iron-rust, with coarse hats and rough straw sandals. They were disposed in lines, a handcuff was on each left wrist, and a thin, rattling iron chain linked all together.

"They are convicts," said Patricia; "on their way to the copper mines, I imagine. They will move presently and we can pass."

At the head of the melancholy platoon stood an officer in dark blue cloth uniform and clumsy shoes, a sword by his side. He stood motionless as an idol, his sparse mustaches waxed, his visored cap set square on his crisp, black hair, his bronze face impassive. The prisoners looked on stolidly at the stir of the station, the flying rick'sha, the crowded sampan in the canal, and the noisy trolley-cars passing near-by. Some talked in low tones and pointed here and there, with furtive glances at the officer. Barbara noted their different expressions, some stolid, low-browed and featureless, some with side-looks of sharper cunning, all touched with oriental apathy.

A bell now began to clamor in the train-shed and there came the rasping hoot of an engine. The officer turned, gave a sharp order, and the prisoners rose, with light clanking of their chains. Another order, and they moved, in double lines of single file, into the station.

Patricia heaved a sigh of relief as the halted traffic started. "Hyaku, Tucker," she called to the driver. "Hyaku means quickly," she explained aside. "His name is Taka, but I call him Tucker because it's easier to remember."

As they rolled swiftly on, through the wondrous panorama of teeming Tokyo streets, the sun hung, an elongated globe of deep orange-crimson, streaked with little whips of rosy cloud. Beneath it the mountains lay like coiled, purple dragons, indolent and surfeited. One star twinkled palely in the lemon-colored sky. Yet now to Barbara the splendor of color seemed tragic, the poured-out beauty but a veil, behind which moved, old and apish and gray, the familiar passions of the world. Before her eyes were flowing and mingling a thousand strands of orient life, yet she saw only the red light glowing on the stone entrance of Shimbashi, with those hideous saffron jackets filing perpetually into its yawning mouth, like unholy spectres in a dream.

CHAPTER V
THE MAKER OF BUDDHAS

Along its crest ran a lane bordered with thorn hedges. A little way inside this stood a huge stone torii, facing a square, ornamented gateway, shaded by cryptomerias. The latter was heavily but chastely carved, and on its ceiling was a painting, in green and white on a gold-leaf ground, of Kwan-on, the All-Pitying. From the gate one looked down across the declivity, where in a walled compound, the rambling buildings of the Embassy showed pallidly amid green foliage. Beyond this were sections of trafficking streets, and still farther a narrow, white road climbed a hill toward a military barracks—a blur of dull, terra-cotta red. In the dying afternoon the lane had an air of placid aloofness. Somewhere in a thoroughfare below a trolley bell sounded, an impudent note of haste and change in a symphony of the intransmutable. Over all was the scent of cherry-blossoms and a faint musk-like odor of incense.

From the gate a mossy pavement, shaded by sacred mochi trees, led to a Buddhist temple-front of the Mon-to sect, before which a flock of fluttering gray-and-white pigeons were pecking grains of rice scattered by a priest, who stood on its upper step, watching them through placid, gold-rimmed spectacles. He wore a long green robe, a stole of gold brocade was around his neck, and his face was seamed with the lines of life's receding tides. At one side of the pavement, worn and grooved by centuries of worshiping feet, was a square stone font and on the other side a graceful bell-tower of red lacquer. Back of this stood a forest of tall bronze lanterns, and beyond them a graveyard, an acre thick with standing stone tablets of quaint, squarish shape, chiseled with deep-cut idiographs. Nearer the graveyard, overshadowed by the greater bulk of the temple, was a long, low nunnery, with clumps of flowers about it. Through its bamboo lattices one caught glimpses of women's figures, clad in slate-color, of placid faces and boyishly shaven heads. About the yard a few little children were playing and a mother, with a baby on her back, looked smilingly on.

The space where the priest stood was connected by a small, curved, elevated bridge with another temple structure standing on the right of the yard, evidently used as a private residence. This was more ornate, far older and touched with decay. Its porch was arcaded, set with oval windows and hung with bronze lanterns green from age. Its entrance doors were beautifully carved, paneled with endless designs in dull colors, and bordered with great gold-lacquer peonies laid on a background of green and vermilion. From their corners jutted snarling heads of grotesque lions and on either side stood gigantic Ni-O—glowering demon-guardians of sacred thresholds. Through the straight-boled trees that grew close about it, came transient gleams of a hedged garden, of burnished green and maroon foliage, where cherry-blooms hung like fluffy balls of pink smoke. The garden had a private entrance—a gate in the outer lane—and over this was a small tablet of unpainted wood:

Which, translated, read:

ALOYSIUS THORN

Maker of Buddhas

Directly opposite stood a small Christian Chapel. It was newly built and still lacked its final decoration—a rose-window, whose empty sashes were stopped now with black cloth. High above the flowering green its slanting roof lifted a cross.

It rose, white and pure, emblem of the Western faith that yet had been born in the East. Over against the ornate pageantry of Buddhist architecture, in a land of another creed, of variant ideals and a passionate devotion to them, it stood, simple, silent, and watchful. The priest on the temple steps was looking at the white cross, regarding it meditatively, as one to whom concrete symbols are badges of spiritual things.

Footsteps grated on the gravel and the occupant of the older temple came slowly through its garden. He was a foreigner, though dressed in Japanese costume. His shoulders were broad and powerful and he moved with a quickness and grace in step and action that had something feline in it. His hair, worn long, was black, touched with gray, and a curved mustache hid his lips. His expression was sensitively delicate and alertly odd—an impression added to by deeply-set eyes, one of which was visibly larger than the other, of the variety known as "pearl," slightly bulbous, though liquid-brown and heavily lashed.

The new-comer ascended the steps and stood a moment silently beside the priest, watching the gluttonous pigeons. As he looked up, he saw the other's gaze fixed on the Chapel cross. A quick shiver ran across his mobile face, and passing, left it hard with a kind of grim defiance.

Presently the priest said in Japanese:

"The Christian temple across the way honorably approaches completion. Assuredly, however, moths have eaten my intelligence. Why does the gloomy hole illustriously elect to remain in its wall?"

"It is for a thing they call a 'window'," said Thorn. "After a time they will put therein an august abomination, representing sublimely hideous cloud-born beings and idiotic-looking saints in colored glass."

The priest nodded his shaven head sagely.

"It will, perhaps, deign to be a gaku of the Christian God. I shall, with deference, study it. I have watered my worthless mind with much arrogant reading of Him. Doubtless He was also Buddha and taught The Way."

An acolyte had come from the temple and approached the red bell-tower. Midway of the huge bronze bell a heavy cedar beam, like a catapult, was suspended from two chains. He swung this till its muffled end struck the metal rim, and the air swelled with a dreamy sob of sound. He swung it again, and the sob became a palpitant moan, like breakers on a far-away beach. Again, and a deep velvety boom throbbed through the stillness like the heart of eternity.

"It is time for the service," said the priest, and turning, went into the temple, from whose interior soon came the woodeny tapping of a mok'gyo—the hollow wooden fish, which is the emblem of the Mon-to sect—and the sound of chanting voices.

Thorn, the man with whom the priest had spoken, crossed the bridge to the other temple with a slow step. He passed between the scowling guardian figures, slid back a paper shoji and entered. The room in which he stood had been the haiden, or room of worship. Around its walls were oblong carvings, marvelously lacquered, of the nine flowers and nine birds of old Japanese art. In one were set six large painted panels; the red seal they bore was that of the great Cho Densu, the Fra Angelico of Japan. In its center, under a brocade canopy, was a raised platform once the seat of the High Priest. It faced a long transept, like a chancel; this ended in a short flight of steps leading, through doors of soft, fretted gold-lacquer, to a huge altar set with carved tables, great tarnished brasses and garish furniture. The walls of the transept were done in red with green ornamentations. From the overhead gloom grotesque phœnix and dragon peered down and in the gathering dimness, shot through with the wan yellow gleam of brass, the place seemed uncanny.

Thorn drew back a heavy drapery which covered a doorway, and entered a room that was windowless and very dark. He lit a candle.

The dim light it furnished disclosed a weird and silent assembly. The space was crowded with strange glimmering deities—of bronze, of silver, of priceless gold-lacquer—the dust thick on their faces, their aureoles misty with cobwebs. Some gazed with passionless serenity, or blessed with outstretched hand; some threatened with scowling faces and clenched thunderbolts: Jizo of the tender smile, in whose sleeves nestle the souls of dead children; Kwan-on, of divine compassion, with her many hands; Emma-dai-O, Judge of the Dead, menacing and terrible; strange sardonic tengu, half-bird, half-human. The floor was thick with them. From shelves on the walls leered swollen, frog-like horrors such as often appear on Alaskan totem-poles, triple-headed divinities of India and China, coiled cobras, idols from Ceylon, and curious Thibetan praying-wheels. A sloping stairway slanted through the gloom; beside it was an image of the red god, Aizen Bosatsu, his appalling countenance framed in lurid flames, seated on a fiery lotos.

The master of this celestial and infernal pantheon closed and locked the door, and mounted the stairway to the loft—a low, rambling room of eccentric shape, under the curving gables.

Here, through a long window beneath the very eaves, the light still came brightly. In the center was a board table, littered with delicate carving-tools. He kindled the charcoal in a bronze hibachi, and set over it a copper pot which began to emit a thick, weedy odor. From a cabinet he took phials containing various powders, and measured into the pot a portion from each. Lastly he added a quantity of gold-leaf, slowly, flake by flake. At one side a white silk cloth was draped over a pedestal; he drew this away and looked at the unfinished figure it had concealed. It was an image of Kwan-on, the All-Merciful.

Through the open window the chant of the priests came clearly:

(He who is beset with perils of dragon and great fish—who drifts on an endless sea—if he offer petition to Kwan-on, waves will not destroy him.)

Thorn crossed the room and leaning his elbows on the window-ledge, looked out. Through the odor of incense the monotonous intonation of the liturgy rose with the grandeur of a Gregorian chant:

(He who is in distress—when immeasurable suffering presses on him—Kwan-on, all-wise and all-powerful, can save him from the world's calamity.)

Once, while the quiet yard echoed back the slow cadences of the antique tongue, the watcher's eyes turned to the image on the pedestal, then came back to an object that drew them—had drawn them for many days against his will!—the white cross of the Chapel. A last glow of refracted light touched it now, as red as blood, a symbol of the infinite passion and pain. A long time he stood there. The twilight deepened, the chant ceased, lights sprang up along the lane, night fell with its sickle moon and crowding stars, but still he stood, his face between his hands.

At length he turned, and groping for the cloth, threw it over the Kwan-on and lit a lamp swinging from a huge brass censer. Unlocking an alcove, he took out a fleece-wrapped bundle and sweeping the tools to one side, set it on the table. He carefully closed the window and thrust a bar through the staple of the door before he unwrapped it.

When the fleece was removed, he propped the image it had contained upright on the table. He poured into a shallow plate a few drops of the liquid heating over the fire-bowl—under the lamplight it gleamed and sparkled like molten gold—and with a small brush, using infinite care, began to lay the lacquer on its carven surface.

Once, at a sound in some room below—perhaps the movement of a servant—he stopped and listened intently. It was as if he worked by stealth, at some labor self-forbidden, to which an impulse, overmastering though half-denied, drove him in secret.

It was a crucifix with a dead Christ upon it.

CHAPTER VI
THE BAYING OF THE WOLF-HOUND

To this room Mrs. Dandridge herself had taken her, presenting to her Haru, whom the bishop's note had brought—a vivid, eager figure from a Japanese fan, who had sunk suddenly prone, every line of her slender form bowed, hands palm-down on the floor and forehead on them, in a ceremonious welcome to the foreign Ojo-San. Her mauve kimono was woven with camelias in silver, set off by an obi, showing a flight of storks on a blue background and clasped in front with a silver firefly. The heavy jet hair was rolled into wings on either side, and a high puff surmounted her forehead. Thin twin spirals, stiff with pomade, joined at the back like the pinions of a butterfly, and against the blue-black loops lay a bright knot of ribbon. She was now moving about the room with silent padding of light feet in snowy, digitated tabi, admiring the gowns which the maid had taken from Barbara's trunks. Occasionally she passed a slim hand up and down a soft wrap with a graceful, purring regard, or held a fleecy boa under her small oval chin and stole a glance in the cheval glass with a little ecstatic quiver of shoulder. Once she paused to look at the lacquer image on the Sendai chest. "Buddha," she said. "Japan man think very good for die-time."

"Haru," said Barbara as the maid's busy Japanese fingers went searching for elusive hooks and eyes, "is it true that every Japanese name has a meaning?"

"So, Ojo-San! That mos' indeed true. All Japan name mean something. 'Haru' mean spring, for because my born that time. Very funny—né?"

"It is very pretty," said Barbara.

"How tha's nize!" was the delighted exclamation. "Mama-San give name. My like name yella-ways for because mama-San no more in this world. My house little lonesome now."

"Where is your house, Haru? Near by?"

The slender hand, pointed to the wooded height behind the garden. "Jus' there on the street call Prayer-to-the-gods. My house so-o-o small, an' garden 'bout such big." She indicated a space of perhaps six feet square. "Funny!—né?"

"And who lives there with you?"

Haru smiled brilliantly. "Oh, so-o-o many peoples! Papa-San, an'—jus' me."

"No brother?"

She shook her head. "My don' got," she said. "Papa-San very angry for because my jus' girl an' no could be kill in Port Arthur!"

She spoke with a smile, but the matter-of-fact words brought suddenly home to Barbara something of the flavor of that passionate loyalty, that hot heroism and debonair contempt of death which has been the theme of a hundred stories. "Do all Japanese feel so, Haru?" she asked. "Would every father be glad to give his son's life for Japan?"

The girl looked at her as if she jested. "Of course! All Japan man mos' happy if to be kill for our Emperor! Tha's for why better to be man. Girl jus' can stay home an' wish!" As the gown's last fastening was slipped into its place, she turned up her lovely oval face with a smiling, sidelong look.

"Ma-a-a!" she exclaimed. "How it is beau-tee-ful! né? only—"

"Only what?"

"My thinks the Ojo-San must suffer through the center!"

Laughingly Barbara caught the other's slim wrist and drew her before the mirror. By oriental standards the Japanese girl was as finely bred as herself. In the two faces, both keenly delicate and sensitive, yet so sharply contrasted—one palely olive under its jetty pillow of straight black hair, the other fair and brown-eyed, crowned with curling gold—the extremes of East and West looked out at each other.

"See, Haru," said Barbara. "How different we are!"

"You so more good-look!" sighed the Japanese girl. "My jus' like the night."

"Ah, but a moonlighted night," cried Barbara, "soft and warm and full of secrets. When you have a sweetheart you will be far more lovely to him than any foreign girl could be!"

Haru blushed rosily. "Sweetheart p'r'aps now," she said, "—all same kind America story say 'bout."

"Have you really, Haru?" cried Barbara. "I love to hear about sweethearts. Maybe—some day—I may have one, too. Some time you'll tell me about him. Won't you?"

Suddenly, far below the window, there came a snarling scramble and a savage, menacing bay. Barbara leaned out. A tawny, long-muzzled wolf-hound, fastened to a stake, glared up at her out of red-dimmed eyes.

"Poor fellow!" she exclaimed. "He looks sick. Does he have to be tied up?"

The Japanese girl shivered. "Very bad dog," she said. "My think very danger to not kill."

The deep tone of the dinner gong shuddered through the house and Barbara hastened out. Patricia met her in the hall and the two girls, with arms about each other's waists, descended the broad angled stair to the dining-room, where the Ambassador stood, tall and spare and iron-gray, with a contagious twinkle in his kindly eye.

"Well," he asked, "did you feel the earthquake?"

Barbara gave an exclamation of dismay. "Has there been one already?"

"Pshaw!" he said contritely. "Perhaps there hasn't. You see, in Japan, we get so used to asking that question—"

"Now, Ned!" warned Mrs. Dandridge. "You'll have Barbara frightened to death. We really don't have them so very often, my dear—and only gentle shakes. You mustn't be dreaming of Messina."

The Ambassador pointed to the ceiling, where a wide crack zigzagged across. "There's a recent autograph to bear me out. It happened on the eleventh of last month."

"Father remembers the date because of the horrible accident it caused," said Patricia. "A piece of the kitchen plaster came down in his favorite dessert and we had to fall back on pickled plums.

"I'm simply wild to see your gowns, Barbara," she continued, as they took their places. "Is that the latest sleeve, and is everything going to be slinky? We're always about six months behind. I know a girl in Yokohama who goes to every steamer and kodaks the smartest tourists. I've almost been driven to do it myself."

"You should adopt the Japanese dress, Patsy," said Mrs. Dandridge. "How does it seem, Barbara, to see kimono all around you?"

"I can't get it out of my mind," she answered, "that they are all wearing them for some sort of masquerade."

"It takes a few days to get used to it," said the Ambassador. "And what a beautiful and practical costume it is!"

"And comfortable!" sighed Patricia. "No 'bones' or tight places, and only four or five things to put on. I don't wonder European women look queer to the Japanese. The cook's wife told me the other day that the first foreign lady she ever saw looked to her like a wasp with a wig on like a Shinto devil."

There rose again on the still night air the savage bay Barbara had heard in her room. "I'm afraid I must make up my mind to lose Shiro," the Ambassador said regretfully. "He's a Siberian wolf-hound that a friend sent me from Moscow. But the climate doesn't agree with him, apparently. For the last two days he's seemed really unsafe. There's a famous Japanese dog-doctor in this section, but he's been sick himself and I haven't liked to go to an ordinary native 'vet.' But I shall have him looked at to-morrow."

"I do hope you will," said Mrs. Dandridge nervously. "He almost killed Patsy's Pomeranian the first day he came. Watanabé says he hasn't touched his food to-day, and we can't take any risks with so many children in the compound. We have forty-seven, Barbara," she continued, "counting the stablemen's families, and some of them are the dearest mites! Every Christmas we give them a tree. It makes one feel tremendously patriarchal!"

It was a home-like meal, albeit thin slices of lotos-stem floated in Barbara's soup, the lobster had no claws, and the entrée was baked bamboo. Save for a high, four-paneled screen of gold-leaf with delicate etchings of snow-clad pines, the white room was without ornament, but the table gleamed with old silver, and in its center was a great bowl of pink azaleas. Smooth-faced Japanese men-servants came and went noiselessly in snowy footwear and dark silk houri whose sleeves bore the Embassy eagle in silver thread.

The Ambassador was a man of keen observation, and a cheerful philosophy. His theory of life was expressed in a saying of his: "Human-kind is about the same as it has always been, except a good deal kinder." He had learned the country at first hand. He had a profound appreciation of its whole historical background, one gained not merely from libraries, but from deeper study of the essential qualities of Japanese character and feeling. He had the perfect gift, moreover, of the raconteur, and he held Barbara passionately attentive as he sketched, in bold outlines, the huge picture of Japanese modernization. Yet light as was his touch, he nevertheless made her see beneath the veneer of the foreign, the unaltering ego of a civilization old and austere, of unfamiliar, strenuous ideals, with cast steel conventions, eternal mysteries of character and of racial destiny.

Coffee was served in the small drawing-room—a home-like, soft-toned room of crystal-paned bookcases, and furniture that had been handed down in the Dandridge family from candle-lighted colony days.

"It seems a shame," said Mrs. Dandridge, "that this evening has to be broken, but Patsy and I must look in at the Charity Bazaar. I'm sure you won't mind, Barbara, if we leave you alone now for an hour or so. It's a new idea: every lady is to bring something she has no further use for, but which is too good to throw away."

"I presume," observed the Ambassador innocently, "that some of them will bring their husbands."

"Ned," said Mrs. Dandridge, as she drew on her wrap, "people will soon think you haven't a serious side. It would serve you right if I took you along as my contribution."

"Ah," returned he, "I was thoughtful enough to make a previous engagement. Doctor Bersonin is coming to see me."

Patsy's nose took a decided elevation.

"The Government expert," she said. "He was on the train. It's the first time I ever saw him without that smart-looking Japanese head-boy of his who goes with him everywhere as interpreter."

"I've noticed that," Mrs. Dandridge said. "He's always with him in his automobile. By the way, Patsy, who does that boy remind me of? It has always puzzled me."

"Why," Patricia answered, "he looks something like that Japanese student we saw so often the winter Barbara and we were in Monterey. You remember, Barbara—the one who spoke such perfect English. We thought he was loony, because he used to sit on the beach all day and sail little wooden boats."

"So he does," said her mother. "There's a decided resemblance. But Doctor Bersonin's boy is anything but loony. He has a most intelligent face."

"Besides," said Patricia, "the other was nearsighted and wore spectacles. Good-by, Barbara. I hope the doctor will be gone when we get back."

Her voice came muffled from the hall "—Oh, I can't help it, mother! I'm only a diplomat-once-removed! He is horrid!"

CHAPTER VII
DOCTOR BERSONIN

The smile left her face. Something had been said in the farther room which caught her attention and in a moment she found herself listening intently.

"I understand the trials of the new powder have been very successful," the Ambassador was saying. "Is it destined to revolutionize warfare, do you think?"

"It is too soon to tell yet," was the reply, "just what the result will be. It will enormously increase the range of projectiles, as Your Excellency may guess, and its area of destruction will nearly double that of lyddite."

Barbara felt, rather than saw, that the Ambassador gave a little shudder. "I can imagine what that means," he said. "I saw Port Arthur after the siege. So war is to grow more dreadful still! When will it cease, I wonder."

"Never," Bersonin answered, with a cold smile. "It is the love of power that makes war, and that, in man, is inherent and ineradicable. A nation is only the individual in the aggregate, and selfishness is the guiding gospel of both."

To Barbara the words seemed coldly, cruelly repellant. She felt a sudden quiver of dislike run over her.

"You paint a sorry picture," said the Ambassador. "Can human ingenuity go much further, then? What, in your opinion, will be the fighting engine of the future?"

"The engine of the future"—Bersonin spoke deliberately—"will be along other lines. It will be an atomic one. It will employ no projectile and no armor plate will resist it. The discoverer will have harnessed the law of molecular vibration. As there is a positive force that binds atoms together, so there must be a negative force that, under certain conditions, can drive them apart!"

He spoke with what seemed an extraordinary conviction. His manner had subtly changed. For the first time his tone had gathered something like feeling, and the dry, metallic voice seemed to Barbara to vibrate with a curious, gloating triumph.

"Granted such a force," he went on, "and a machine to generate and direct it, and of what value is the most powerful battle-ship, the most stupendous fort? Mere silly shreds of steel and stone! Why, such an engine might be carried in a single hand, and yet the nation that possessed it could be master of the world!"

A dark flush had risen to his pallid cheek, and on the arm of his chair Barbara saw the massive fingers of one huge hand clench and unclench with a furtive, nervous gesture. The sight gave her a sharp sense of recoil as if from the touch of something sinister and evilly suggestive.

"No!" said the Ambassador vehemently. "Humanity would revolt. Such a discovery would be worth less than nothing! Its use by any warring nation would call down the execration of civilization, and the man who knew the secret would be too dangerous to be at large!"

There was dead silence for a moment. Bersonin sat motionless, staring straight before him. Very slowly the color seemed to fade from his cheek. When he spoke again his voice had regained its dead level of tonelessness.

"That has occurred to me," he said. "I think Your Excellency is right. Invention may do its work too well. However—no doubt we speak of scientific impossibilities; let us hope so, at any rate."

Barbara pushed the photographs aside and slipped into the next room, closing the door and drawing the heavy portières that hung over it. She had had for a moment a vague, almost childish, sense of shrinking as if from something monstrous and uncanny—such a sensation as the naked diver may have, when, peering through his water-glass, he sees a dim grisly shape glide, stealthy and cold, through the opaque depths. She was growing absurdly fanciful, she thought. She did not turn on the electric light, but threw open one of the long, French windows. There was a new moon and a pale radiance flooded the room, with a sudden odor of wistaria and plum-blossoms. The window gave on to a porch running the length of the house, and this made her think suddenly of home. Yet the air was too humid for California, too moist and rich even for Florida. And suddenly she found herself pitying the people there to whom the East would always be a closed book. Yet how dim and vague Japan had been to her a month before!

A grand piano stood open by the window and in the dim light she sat down and let her fingers wander idly in long arpeggios. She could see one side of the Japanese garden, with a glimpse of a tiny dry lake and a pebbled rivulet spanned by an arching bridge of red lacquer. It ended in a sharp, sloping hill covered with shrubbery. On the ridge far above she distinguished the outlines of native houses and flanking them the curved, Tartar-like gables of a gray old temple. Somewhere, beyond that little hill, perhaps, stood the Chapel erected to her father's memory, which she had yet to see. As her fingers strayed over the ivory keys, she thought of him, of his vivid, aberrant career and untimely end.

There are nights in the Japanese spring when the landscape, in its wondrous delicacy of tones, seems only an envelope of something subtler and unseen, the filmy covering of a beauty that is wholly spiritual. To-night it seemed so to Barbara. The close was very still, wrapped in a dreamy haze as soft as sleep, the mountains on the horizon wan shapes of silver mist, semi-diaphanous. It seemed to her that in this living, sentient breath of Japan, her father was nearer to her than he had ever been before.

The thought brought to her vague memories of her mother and of her childhood. Old airs began to mingle with the chords, and on the shrill fairy sound-carpet woven by the myriad insect-looms of the garden, the bits of melody went treading softly out across the perfume of the wistaria.

CHAPTER VIII
"SALLY IN OUR ALLEY"

From the bungalow on the Yokohama Bluff, Daunt had come back to Tokyo with a sense of dissatisfaction deeper than should have been caused by his jarring talk with Phil. Perhaps, though he did not guess it, his mood had to do with a bulky letter in his pocket, received that day. It was from "Big" Murray, his chum at college, whom he had commonly addressed by opprobrious epithets that covered an affection time had not diminished. Of all the men in his class Daunt would have picked him as the one least likely to marry. Yet the letter had contained a wedding-invitation and a ream of the usual hyperbole. "Going to name me godfather, is he!" Daunt had muttered as he read. "The driveling old horse-thief!" For in some elusive way the intended distinction suggested that he himself was a hoary back-number, not to be reckoned among the forces of youth. Strolling from Shimbashi Station, under the clustered, gaily-colored paper-lanterns, swaying above the rustle and stir of the exotic street, this thought rankled. A vague discontent stirred in him.

Tokyo had been the objective point of Daunt's six years of diplomatic career, and he had found the Kingdom of the Slender Swords a fascinating and absorbing study. He loved its contrasts and its contradictions, its marvelous artistry, the reserve and nobility of its people, and its savage, unshamed, sincerity of purpose. In the absorbing routine of the Chancery and the bright gaieties of the capital's diplomatic circle, the first year had gone swiftly enough. Since then the Glider experiments had lent an added zest.

Even at college, Langley's first aëroplane had interested him and out of that interest had grown a course of reading which had given him a broad technical knowledge of applied mechanics. In Japan he had conceived the idea of the new fan-propeller, worked out in many an hour of study in the little Japanese house in Aoyama, which he had taken because it adjoined the parade-ground where his earliest experiments were made. At first the Corps Diplomatique had smiled at this as a harmless pour passer le temps, to be classified with the Roumanian Minister's kennel of Pomeranians or the Chilian Secretary's collection of daimyo dolls. But week by week the little crowd of Japanese spectators had grown larger; often Daunt had recognized among the attentive brown faces this or that superior military officer whom he knew, albeit in civilian dress. One day his friend, Viscount Sakai, a dapper young officer on the General Staff, had surprised him with the offer from the Japanese War Department of the use of an empty garage on the edge of the great esplanade. Only a month ago, he had awaked to the knowledge that his name was known to the aëro enthusiasts of Paris, New York and Vienna, and that his propeller was an assured success.

Yet to-night he felt that he had somehow failed. The splendid vitality of the moving scene, the thud and click of wooden géta and the whirr of rick'sha—all the many-keyed diapason of the rustling, lanterned vistas stretching under the pale moon-lighted sky—lacked the sense of intimate companionship. The warm still air, freighted with aromatic scents of cedar from some new-built shop, the pungent smell of incense burning before some shadowed shrine, the odors of drenched shrubbery behind the massive retaining wall of some rich noble's compound, came to him with a new sense of estrangement. The murmured sound of voices behind the glimmering paper shoji told him, suddenly, that he was lonely. For the first time in six years, he was feeling keenly his long isolation from the things of home, the pleasant fellowship and the firesides of old friends. In this foreign service which he so loved, he had been growing out of touch, he told himself, out of thought, of the things "Big" Murray had sought and found.

Unconsciously, the "drivel," as he had denominated it, of the letter in his pocket, had infected him with sweet and foolish imaginings, and slowly these took the nebulous shape of a woman. He had often dreamed of her, though he had never seen her face. It was half-veiled now in the bluish haze of his pipe, while she talked to him before a fire of driftwood (that burned with red and blue lights because of sea-ghosts in it) and her voice was low and clear like a flute.

The wavering outline was still before his mind's eye as he trod the quiet road that led to the Embassy, entered its wide gate and slowly crossed the silent garden toward his bachelor cottage on the lawn. And there, suddenly, the vision had seized a vagrant melody and had spoken to him in song. Daunt thrust his cold pipe into his pocket and listened with head thrown back.

It was no brilliant display of technique that held him, for the player was touching simple chords, but these were singing old melodies that took him far to other scenes and other times. He smiled to himself. How long it had been since he had sung them—not since the old college days! That happy, irresponsible era of senior dignities came back vividly to him, the campus and the singing. For years he had not recollected it all so keenly! He had been glee-club soloist, pushed forward on all occasions and applauded to the echo. Praise of his singing he had accepted somewhat humorously—never but once had it touched him deeply, and that had been on commencement afternoon.

He had slipped away from the wavering cheers at the station, because he could not bear the farewells, and, far down one of the campus lanes, had come on pretty Mrs. Claybourne sitting on a rustic bench. Again he heard her speak, as plainly as if it were yesterday: "Why, if it isn't Mr. Daunt! I wonder how the university can open in the fall without you!" He had sat down beside her as she said: "This very insistent young person with me has been heartbroken because we could not get tickets for the Glee-Club Concert last night. She wanted to hear you sing."

He had looked up then to see a young girl, seated on the leaning trunk of a tulip-tree. Her neutral-tinted skirt lay against the dark bark; her face was almost hidden by a spray of the great, creamy-pink blossoms. Some quality in its delicate loveliness had made him wish to please her, and sitting there he had sung the song that was his favorite. Mrs. Claybourne had pulled a big branch of the tulip-tree to hand him like a bouquet over the footlights, but the girl's parted lips, her wide deep brown eyes, had thanked him in a better way!

The music, now floating over the garden, by such subconscious association, recalled this scene, overlaid, but never forgotten. Hark! A cascade of silver notes, and then an old air that had been revived in his time to become the madness of the music-halls and the pet of the pianolas—the one the crowded campus had been wont to demand with loudest voice when his tenor led the "Senior Singing." It brought back with a rush the familiar faces, the gray ivied dormitories with their slim iron balconies, the throbbing plaint of mandolins, and his own voice—