However, when his wife appeared about an hour and a half afterwards, bringing her lord’s breakfast on another red lacquer table she besought him kindly to condescend to eat, and added that he must be very tired after so much study.  To this Mr. Fujinami replied by passing his hand over his forehead and saying, “D[=o]m[=o]!  So des’ ne! (Indeed, it is so!) I have tired myself with toil.”

This little farce repeated itself every morning.  All the household knew that the master’s hour of meditation was merely an excuse for an after-sleep.  But it was a tradition in the family that the master should study thus; and Mr. Fujinami’s grandfather had been a great scholar in his generation.  To maintain the tradition Mr. Fujinami had hired a starveling journalist to write a series of random essays of a sentimental nature, which he had published under his own name, with the title, Fallen Cherry-Blossoms.

Such is the hold of humbug in Japan that nobody in the whole household, including the students who respected nothing, ever allowed themselves the relief of smiling at the sacred hour of study, even when the master’s back was turned.

* * * * *

“O hay[=o] gozaimas’!”

“For honourable feast of yesterday evening indeed very much obliged!”

The oily forehead of Mr. Ito touched the matting floor with the exaggerated humility of conventional gratitude.  The lawyer wore a plain kimono of slate-grey silk.  His American manners and his pomposity had both been laid aside with the tweed suit and the swallow-tail.  He was now a plain Japanese business man, servile and adulatory in his patron’s presence.  Mr. Fujinami Gentaro bowed slightly in acknowledgment across the remnants of his meal.

“It is no matter,” he said, with a few waves of his fan; “please sit at your ease.”

The two gentlemen arranged themselves squatting cross-legged for the morning’s confidential talk.

“The cherry-flowers,” Ito began, with a sweep of the arm towards the garden grove, “how quickly they fall, alas!”

“Indeed, human life also,” agreed Mr. Fujinami.  “But the guests of last evening, what is one to think?”

“Ma!  In truth, sensei (master or teacher), it would be impossible not to call that Asa San a beauty.”

“Ito Kun,” said his relative in a tone of mild censure, “it is foolish always to think of women’s looks.  This foreigner, what of him?”

“For a foreigner, that person seems to be honourable and grave,” answered the retainer, “but one fears that it is a misfortune for the house of Fujinami.”

“To have a son who is no son,” said the head of the family, sighing.

“D[=o]m[=o]! It is terrible!” was the reply; “besides, as the sensei so eloquently said last night, there are so few blossoms on the old tree.”