Geoffrey left his partner at the end of their second dance.  He went upstairs to see his wife.  He found her sleeping peacefully; so he returned to the ballroom again.  He looked in at the bar, and drank another glass of champagne.  He was beginning to enjoy himself.

He could not find Yae, so he danced with the gipsy girl, who had a stride like a kangaroo.  Then Yae reappeared.  They had two more dances together, and another glass of champagne.  The night was fine.  There was a bright moonlight.  Geoffrey remarked that it was jolly hot for dancing.  Yae suggested a stroll along the sea-shore; and in a few minutes they were standing together on the beach.

“Oh!  Look at the bonfires,” cried Yae.

A few hundred yards down the sea-front, where the black shadows of the native houses overhung the beach, the lighted windows gleamed softly like flakes of mica.  The fishermen were burning seaweed and jetsam for ashes which would be used as fertilizer.  Tongues of fire were flickering skywards.  It was a blue night.  The sky was deep blue, and the sea an oily greenish blue.  Blue flames of salt danced and vanished over the blazing heaps.  The savage figures squatting round the fires were dressed in tunics of dark blue cloth.  Their legs were bare.  Their healthy faces lit up by the blaze were the color of ripe apricots.  Their attitudes and movements were those of apes.  The elder men were chattering together; the younger ones were gazing into the fire with an expression of healthy stupor.  A boat was coming in from the sea.  A ruby light hung at the prow.  It was rowed by four men standing and yulohing, two in the stern and two at the bow.  They were intoning a rhythmic chant to which their bodies moved.  The boat was slim and pointed; and the rowers looked like Vikings.

The shadows cast by the moonlight were inky black, the shadows of the beaked ships, the shadows of the savage huts, of the ape-like men, of the huge round fish-baskets like immense amphorae.

Far out from land, where the wide floating nets were spread, lights were scattered like constellations.  The foreland was clearly visible, with the high woods which clothed its summit.  But the farther end of the beach faded into an uneven string of lights, soft and spectral as will-o’-the-wisps.  Warmth rose from the sleeping earth; and a breeze blew in from the sea, making a strange metallic rustling, which to Japanese ears is the sweetest natural music, in the gaunt sloping pine-trees, whose height in the semi-darkness was exaggerated to monstrous and threatening proportions.

Geoffrey felt a little hand in his, warm and moist.

“Shall we go and see Dai-Butsu?” said Yae.

Geoffrey had no idea who Dai-Butsu might be, but he gladly agreed.  She fluttered on beside him with her long kimono sleeves like a big moth.  Geoffrey’s head was full of wine and waltz tunes.

They dived into a narrow street with dwellings on each side.  Some of the houses were shuttered and silent.  Others were open to the street with a completeness of detail denied by our stingy window-casements—­women sitting up late over their needlework, men talking round the firebox, shopkeepers adding up their accounts, fishermen mending their tackle.