and then torn into pieces and thrown into a brass vase in Mme. Fontaine’s drawing-room!  Why had she been so angry?  She could not understand it now.  She only knew that the longer she poured her troubles into Mme. Fontaine’s ears the more sympathetic the widow became until Nancy was worked into a perfect rage.  As for the widow, she had said very little indeed, only a few words now and then, vague, suggestive remarks, but they had set Nancy thinking; had stirred her up so violently, indeed, that she had written that foolish letter.  There had been no waste basket by the desk and Nancy, after a wretched sleepless night, had torn up the letter and dropped it in the nearest vase.  Why had she not torn it into smaller bits?  Why had she not burned it in a charcoal brazier?  Why had she ever written it at all?  Why—­why—?  A dozen whys flashed through her troubled mind.  She would never rest again until she knew the letter had been entirely destroyed, reduced to ashes.  Out of this long train of unhappy thought a resolution came to Nancy to write to Mme. Fontame and ask her to find the letter and burn it up.  This she accordingly did a few days after the visit to Nikko, and of what came of it more will be told later.

In the meantime, while Nancy, goaded by a troubled conscience was weeping abundantly into her pillow, Billie and little Mary Price lay sleeping peacefully in the great cathedral forest.

Precisely at the moment that Nancy’s disturbed fancies had taken the form of a resolution Billie and Mary opened their eyes on a world of velvety blackness.  Straight overhead through the lacework of intertwined boughs gleamed an occasional tiny star, like the light shining through a pin prick in a black curtain.  Scarcely two hours had passed since they had slipped into the unknown, and now sitting up and rubbing their eyes, they wondered where in the world they were.  Hearing Mary stirring beside her in the dark, Billie put out a hand and grasped Mary’s groping to meet it.  The two friends sat silently for a few minutes.  At last Billie said softly: 

“What are we going to do, Mary, dear?”

“I am thinking of what they are going to do,” answered Mary.  “How frightened they will be about us, Billie!  As for me, I can’t help feeling happy out in this dark peaceful place.  I should like to lie here all night and watch the dawn come through the trees.”

All of which was extremely poetic, but Billie had become suddenly prosaic at the thought of her father, wild with anxiety she was certain, searching the terraced mountainside for them at the risk of falling off a precipice or tumbling into the river.  Besides, at that moment, she felt a puff of hot wind in her face, and immediately was conscious that she was very thirsty and that the palms of her hands were dry and burning.

“Don’t you think it’s very hot, Mary?” she whispered.  “I feel as if I had been baked brown in an oven.”