That whisper made such a wrench at her husband’s heart that his grip tightened on the frail shoji, and with a nervous spasm he sent it clattering out of its socket flat upon the floor of the room, like a screen blown down by the wind.  Ito dashed forward to help Geoffrey replace the damage.  When they turned round again, the two women had disappeared.

“Captain Barrington,” said Ito, “I think you had better go away.  You make bad thing worse.”

Geoffrey frowned at the little creature.  He would have liked to have crushed him underfoot like a cockroach.  But as that was impossible, nothing remained for him to do but to depart, leaving the track of his dirty boots on the shining corridor.  His last glimpse of his cousins’ home was of two little serving-maids scuttering up with dusters to remove the defilement.

Asako had fainted.

* * * * *

As Reggie had said in Chuzenji, “What actually happens does not matter:  it is the thought of what might have happened, which sticks.”  If Reggie’s tolerant and experienced mind could not rid itself of the picture conjured up by the possibility of his friend’s treachery and his mistress’s lightness, how could Asako, ignorant and untried, hope to escape from a far more insistent obsession?  She believed that her husband was guilty.  But the mere feeling that it was possible that he might be guilty would have been enough to numb her love for him, at any rate for a time.  She had never known heartache before.  She did not realise that it is a fever which runs its appointed course of torment and despair, which at length after a given term abates, and then disappears altogether, leaving the sufferer weak but whole again.  The second attack of the malady finds its victim familiar with the symptoms, resigned to a short period of misery and confident of recovery.  A broken heart like a broken horse is of great service to its owner.

But Asako was like one stricken with an unknown disease.  Its violence appalled her, and in her uncertainty she prayed for death.  Moreover, she was surrounded by counsellors who traded on her little faith, who kept on reminding her that she was a Japanese, that she was among her father’s people who loved her and understood her, that foreigners were notoriously treacherous to women, that they were blue-eyed and cruel-hearted, that they thought only of money and material things.  Let her stay in Japan, let her make her home there.  There she would always be a personage, a member of the family.  Among those big, bold-voiced foreign women, she was overshadowed and out of place.  If her husband left her for a half-caste, what chance had she of keeping him when once he got back among the women of his own race?  Mixed marriages, in fact, were a mistake, an offence against nature.  Even if he wished to be faithful to her, he could not really care for her as he could for an Englishwoman.

* * * * *