The prospect of being with the girls and the kiddies again makes me want to do a Highland Fling, even if I am in a monastery with a sad-faced young priest serving me tea and mournful sighs between prayers.

What a flirtatious old world it is after all.  It smites you and bruises you, then binds up the hurts by giving you a desire or so of your heart.  Just now the desire of my heart is to catch that train for Kioto.

So here goes a prayer, pinned to a shrine, for a body intact as I tread the path that drops straight down the mountain, through the crimson glory of the maples and the blazing yellow of the gingko tree, to the tiny little station far away that looks like a decorated hen-coop.

KIOTO, September, 1911.

Dearest Mate: 

I cannot spend a drop of ink in telling you how I got here.  How the baggage beast ran away and decorated the mountain shrubbery with my belongings.  And how after all my hurry of dropping down from Koyo San, the brakesman forgot to hook our car to the train and started off on a picnic while the engine went merrily on and left us out in the rice-fields.  Suffice it to say I landed in a whirl that spun me down to Uncle’s house and back to the hotel.  And by the way my thoughts are going, for all I know I may be booked to spin on through eternity.

My visit to Sada was so full of things that did not happen.  When I reached the house, I sent in my card to Sada.  Uncle came gliding in like a soft-footed panther.  He did it so quietly that I jumped when I saw him.  We took up valuable time repeating polite greetings, as set down on page ten of the Book of Etiquette, in the chapter on Calls Made by Inconvenient Foreigners.

When our countless bows were finished, I asked in my coaxingest voice if I might see Sada.  Presently she came in, dressed in Japanese clothes and beautiful even in her pallor.  She was changed—­sad, and a little drooping.  The conflict of her ideals of duty to her mother’s people and the real facts in the case, had marked her face with something far deeper than girlish innocence.  It was inevitable.  But above the evidences of struggle there was a something which said the dead and gone Susan West had left more than a mere memory.  Silently I blessed all her kind.

Sada was unfeignedly glad to see me, and I longed to take her in my arms and kiss her.  But such a display would have marked me in Uncle’s eyes as a dangerous woman with unsuppressed emotions, and unfit for companionship with Sada.  I had hoped his Book of Etiquette said, “After this, bow and depart.”  But my hopes had not a pin-feather to rest on.  He stayed right where he was.  All right, old Uncle, thought I, if stay you will, then I shall use all a woman’s power to beguile you and a woman’s wit to out-trick you, so I can make you show your hand.  It is going to be a game with the girl as the prize.  It is also going to be like playing leap-frog with a porcupine.  He has cunning and authority to back him, and I have only my love for Sada.