O’Kami nodded her head and smiled.

“Arrange all the day before to this.”

“Do you love him?” asked Mary, in an awed tone of voice.

O’Kami looked puzzled.  The word “love” she had not learned.

“O’Kami much happy.  Honorable mother of husband not any more.  Gone.”  She pointed up.

“Goodness!” broke in Elinor.  “She means that there will be no mother-in-law, so the marriage is sure to be a happy one.  What a mother-in-law ridden place this country is!”

She spoke too rapidly for the Japanese girl to grasp the meaning of any word except “mother-in-law.”

“Mother-in-law,” she repeated slowly.  “Little Japanese girl much afraid to great mother-in-law.”

The girls laughed and O’Kami’s silvery note mingled with theirs.

“I found something quite new and interesting in the garden the other day,” observed Mary.  “Or rather not quite new, but quite old.  Who wants to see it?”

“Lead on, Macduff,” ordered Billie.

“It’s an old shrine,” continued Mary.  “Komatsu says it’s to the Compassionate God, Jizu.  He’s sitting cross-legged in a little niche in the hillside below the bridge and he has a beautiful frame of clematis vines around him.  I think he’s delightful.”

O’Kami San was unable to grasp the meaning of this rapid fire of words, at least it seemed to her to be a rapid fire.  Most people are under the impression that a foreign language is spoken faster than their own.  But she trotted along beside the others, always with the same polite, intelligent smile, as if she understood every word.

Having crossed the bridge, they followed a narrow path through a grove of pine trees.  The path took an unexpected curve to the right and led them around the side of a grassy embankment under which sat the stone image of the Compassionate God, Jizu.  The inscrutable smile of the nation hovered on the lips of the ancient idol, and his compassionate stone eyes looked out upon the green little world around him with a gentle tolerance.  Time and tempests had worn away his arms and softened the outlines of his stone countenance.  He was indeed a graven image of kindly mien and of a certain majesty of expression.

But there was, another visitor at the shrine of the Compassionate God.  She lay flat on her face in a tumbled, many-colored little heap before the gray old image at whose feet was her offering:  a pitiful little bunch of wild roses.  She had been sobbing.  It was easy to tell.  The storm of weeping had passed now and she lay quite still, but at intervals there was that catch in the breath which follows a period of bitter crying.

The three American girls paused at the edge of the miniature lawn about the shrine and exchanged embarrassed glances.  O’Kami Sail drew back a step or two.  It was their intention to creep away as noiselessly as possible and leave the unhappy worshiper at the shrine none the wiser that she had been observed by profane, foreign eyes.  But at this moment a temple bell not far off sent out a clear silver note in the stillness.  The bright-colored heap stirred into life and the sorrowful worshiper rose and looked about her bewildered.