Geoffrey had not brought his wife.  He explained that they had been to pay their first call on Japanese relations, and that they had been honourably out; but even so the strain had been a severe one, and Asako had retired to rest at the hotel.

“But why not come and stay here with me?” suggested Reggie.  “I have got plenty of spare rooms; and there is such a gulf fixed between people who inhabit hotels and people with houses of their own.  They see life from an entirely different point of view; their spirits hardly ever meet.”

“Have you room for eight large boxes of dresses and kimonos, several cases of curios, a French maid, a Japanese guide, two Japanese dogs and a monkey from Singapore?”

Reggie whistled.

“No really, is it as bad as all that?  I was thinking that marriage meant just one extra person.  It would have been fun having you both here, and this is the only place in Tokyo fit to live in.”

“It looks a comfortable little place,” agreed Geoffrey.  They had reached the secretary’s house, and the newcomer was admiring its artistic arrangement.

“Just like your rooms in London!”

Reggie prided himself on the exclusively oriental character of his habitation, and its distinction from any other dwelling place which he had ever possessed.  But then Geoffrey was only a Philistine, after all.

“I suppose it’s the photographs which look like old times,” Geoffrey went on.  “How’s little Veronique?”

“Veronica married an Argentine beef magnate, a German Jew, the nastiest person I have ever avoided meeting.”

“Poor old Reggie!  Was that why you came to Japan?”

“Partly; and partly because I had a chief in the Foreign Office who dared to say that I was lacking in practical experience of diplomacy.  He sent me to this comic country to find it.”

“And you have found it right enough,” said Geoffrey, inspecting a photograph of a Japanese girl in her dark silk kimono with a dainty flower pattern round the skirts and at the fall of the long sleeves.  She was not unlike Asako; only there was a fraction of an inch more of bridge to her nose, and in that fraction lay the secret of her birth.

“That is my latest inspiration,” said Reggie.  “Listen!”

He sat down at the piano and played a plaintive little air, small and sweet and shivering.

“Japonaiserie d’hiver,” he explained.

Then he changed the burden of his song into a melody rapid and winding, with curious tricklings among the bass notes.

“Lamia,” said Reggie, “or Lilith.”

“There’s no tune in that last one; you can’t whistle it,” said Geoffrey, who exaggerated his Philistinism to throw Reggie’s artistic nature into stronger relief.  “But what has that got to do with the lady?”

“Her name is Smith,” said Reggie.  “I know it is almost impossible and terribly sad; but her other name is Yae.  Rather wild and savage—­isn’t it?  Like the cry of a bird in the night-time, or of a cannibal tribe on the warpath.”