The street led inland towards abrupt hills, which looked like a wall of darkness.  It was lit by the round street lamps, the luminous globules with Chinese letters on them which had pleased Geoffrey first at Nagasaki.  The road entered a gorge between two precipices, the kind of cleft into which the children of Hamlin had followed the Pied Piper.

“I would not like to come here alone,” said Yae, clinging tighter.

“It looks peaceful enough,” said Geoffrey.

“There is a little temple just to the left, where a nun was murdered by a priest only last year.  He chopped her with a kitchen knife.”

“What did he do it for?” asked Geoffrey.

“He loved her, and she would not listen to him; so he killed her.  I think I would feel like that if I were a man.”

They passed under an enormous gateway, like a huge barn door with no barn behind it.  Two threatening gods stood sentinel on either hand.  Under the influence of the moonlight the carved figures seemed to move.

Yae led her big companion along a broad-flagged path between a pollarded avenue.  Geoffrey still did not know what they had come so far to see.  Nor did he care.  Everything was so dreamy and so sweet.

The path turned; and suddenly, straight in front of them, they saw the God—­the Great Buddha—­the immense bronze statue which has survived from the days of Kamakura’s sovereignty.  The bowed head and the broad shoulders were outlined against the blue and starry sky; against the shadow of the woods the body, almost invisible, could be dimly divined.  The moonlight fell on the calm smile and on the hands palm upwards in the lap, with finger-tips and thumb-tips touching in the attitude of meditation.  That ineffably peaceful, smiling face seemed to look down from the very height of heaven upon Geoffrey Barrington and Yae Smith.  The presence of the God filled the valley, patient and powerful, the Creator of the Universe and the Maintainer of Life.

Geoffrey had never seen anything so impressive.  He Stooped down towards his little companion, listening for a response to his own emotion.  It came.  Before he could realize what was happening he felt the soft kimono sleeves like wings round his neck, and the girl’s burning mouth pressing his lips.

“Oh, Geoffrey,” she whispered.

He sat down on a low table in front of a shuttered refreshment bar with Yae on his knee, his strong arm round her, even as she had dreamed.  The Buddha of Infinite Understanding smiled down upon them.

Geoffrey was too little of a prig to scold the girl, and too much of a man not to be touched and flattered by the sincerity of her embrace.  He was too much of an Englishman to ascribe it to its real passionate motive, and to profit by the opportunity.

Instead, he told himself that she was only a child excited by the beauty and the romance of the night even as he was.  He did not begin to realize that he or she were making love.  So he took her on his knee and stroked her hand.