“Egypt is very interesting,” said Asako, correctly; “it is wonderful to think of these great places standing here for thousands and thousands of years.  But it makes one sad, don’t you think?  Everybody here seems to have died long, long ago.  It would be nice to see green fields again, wouldn’t it, Geoffrey dearest?”

The voice of the Spring was speaking clearly.

“And you really want to go to Japan, sweetheart?  It’s the first time I’ve heard you say you want to go.”

“Uncle and Aunt Murata in Paris used always to say about now, ’If we go back to Japan we shall be in time to see the cherry-blossoms.’”

“Why,” asked Geoffrey, “do the Japanese make such a fuss about their cherry-blossoms?”

“They must be very pretty,” answered his wife, “like great clouds of snow.  Besides, the cherry-flowers are supposed to be like the Japanese spirit.”

“So you are my little cherry-blossom—­is that right?”

“Oh no, not the women,” she replied, “the men are the cherry-blossoms.”

Geoffrey laughed.  It seemed absurd to him to compare a man to the frail and transient beauty of a flower.

“Then what about the Japanese ladies,” he asked, “if the men are blossoms?”

Asako did not think they had any special flower to symbolise their charms.  She suggested,—­

“The bamboo, they say, because the wives have to bend under the storms when their husbands are angry.  But, Geoffrey, you are never angry.  You do not give me a chance to be like the bamboo.”

Next day, he boldly booked their tickets for Tokyo.

The long sea voyage was a pleasant experience, broken by fleeting visits to startled friends in Ceylon and at Singapore, and enlivened by the close ephemeral intimacies of life on board ship.

There was a motley company on board S.S.  Sumatra; a company whose most obvious elements, the noisy and bibulous pests in the smoking-room and the ladies of mysterious destination with whom they dallied, were dismissed by Geoffrey at once as being terrible bounders.  Beneath this scum more congenial spirits came to light, officers and Government officials returning to their posts, and a few globe-trotters of leisure.  Everybody seemed anxious to pay attention to the charming Japanese lady; and from such incessant attention it is difficult to escape within the narrow bounds of ship life.  The only way to keep off the impossibles was to form a bodyguard of the possibles.  The seclusion of the honeymoon paradise had to be opened up for once in a way.

Of course, there was much talk about the East; but it was a different point of view, from that of the enthusiasts of Deauville and the Riviera.  These men and women had many of them lived in India, the Malay States, Japan, or the open ports of China, lived there to earn their bread and butter, not to dream about the Magic of the Orient.  For such as these the romance had faded.  The pages of their busy lives were written within a mourning border of discontent, of longing for that home land, to which on the occasion of their rare holidays they returned so readily, and which seemed to have no particular place or use for them when they did return.  They were members of the British Dispersion; but their Zion was of more comfort to them as a sweet memory than as an actual home.