I well understood his sorrow and disappointment.  Pity put all my annoyance to flight.  I promised to go to his house and see if I could help in any way.  I did not tell him that I was about as familiar with young girls from my home land as I was with young eagles, for the undaunted spirit of that child had aroused all my love of adventure; and I wanted to see her.  Then, too, I was haunted by the picture of a lonely girl in a strange land, crying out in the night for her dead father.

I was trembling with new emotion that evening when I brought my invalid in from the garden, and tucked her into bed.

Kishimoto San had not only offered me a tremendous experience, but all unwittingly he made it easily possible for me to defy the tradition of his picture language, and risk Jane Gray as a permanent fireside companion.

III

ZURA

Just below “The House of the Misty Star,” in an old temple, a priest played a merry tattoo on a mighty gong early every morning.  First one stroke and a pause, then two strokes and a pause, followed by so many strokes without pause that the sounds merged into one deep mellow tone reaching from temple to distant hills.  It was, so to speak, the rising bell for the deities in that district and announced to them the beginning of their day of business.

In years gone by the echo of the music had stirred me only to a drowsy thankfulness that I was no goddess, happy as I turned for a longer sleep.  The morning after Kishimoto San’s visit, long before any sound disturbed the sleeping gods, from my window I watched the Great Dipper drop behind the crookedest old pine in the garden and heard the story of the night-wind as it whispered its secret to the leaves.

Usually my patience was short with people who went mooning around the house at all hours of the night when they should have been sleeping.  Somehow though, things seemed changed and changing.  Coming events were not casting shadows before them in my home, but thrills.  Formerly I had not even a passing acquaintance with thrills.  Now, half a century behind-time, they were beginning to burst in upon me all at once, as would a troop of merry friends bent on giving me a surprise party, and the things they seemed to promise kept me awake half the night.  My restlessness must have penetrated the thin partition of my Japanese house, for when I went out to breakfast there sat Jane Gray, very small and pale, but as bright-eyed and perky as a sparrow.  It was her first appearance at the morning meal.

Before I could ask why she had not rested as usual, she put a question to me.  “Well, what is it?”

“What’s what?” I returned.

“Why,” she exclaimed, “you have been up most of the night.  I wanted to ask if you were ill, but I was counting sheep jumping over the fence, and it made me so sleepy I mixed you up with them.  I hope it isn’t the precious cod-liver babies that are keeping you awake.”