The fire in Zura’s eyes began to burn.  “Think it’s funny?  I don’t.  Have one.”  She flung a package of cigarettes in my lap.

Ignoring the impertinence of her speech and act I hastened to explain the cause of my amusement.  I told her of my desolate childhood, of the quiet village in which my uneventful girlhood was passed, where the most exciting thing that ever happened was a funeral about once in four years.

When I finished she showed the first signs of friendliness as she exclaimed, “Heavens!  Didn’t you have any ‘movies,’ any chums, any boys to treat you now and then to a sundae?”

Kishimoto San certainly stated a fact.  Her English was strange.  I was sure the words were not in my dictionary.  But I would not appear stupid before this child who had no business to know more than I did.  So I looked a little stern and said that my Sundays never seemed a treat; they were no different from week-days.  If the other things she talked about were in a circus, I had never been to one to hear them.

At this such a peal of laughter went up from the girl as I dare say at no time had ever played about the ancient beams.  The maid, just entering with hot tea, stood as if stunned.  The old grandmother sat like a statue of age with hand uplifted, protesting against any expression of youth and its joys.

Mrs. Wingate pushed aside the paper doors, gently chiding, “Zura, yo’ naughty ve’y bad.”

But the reproof was as meaningless as the babbling of a baby.  Neither disapproval nor black looks availed; unchecked the merriment went on until exhausted by its own violence.  I knew she was laughing at me, but what mattered?  To her I was a comical old figure in a strange museum.  To me she stood for all I had lost of girlhood rights and I wanted her for my friend.  Her laughter went through me like a draft of wine.  The echo swept a long silent chord, and the tune it played was the jig-time of youth.

When Zura caught her breath and explained the meaning of her words, it disclosed to me a phase of life of which I had never dreamed.  Pictures that moved and talked while you looked, public halls for dancing, and boys meeting young girls alone after dark to “treat” them!  The child spoke of it all easily and as a matter of course.  I knew more than I wanted of the dark side of Oriental life, but I had been so long accustomed to idealizing my own country and all its ways that her talk was to me like an unkind story about a dear friend.

But happy to find a listener who was interested in things familiar to her—­Zura chattered away, of her friends and her pleasures, and though many of her words were in an unknown tongue, the picture she unconsciously drew of herself was as clear as transparency.  It was an unguided, undisciplined life, big with possibilities for love or hate that even now was wavering in the balance for good or bad.

Once again the afternoon sun fell upon the girl.  It touched her face, tender of contour and coloring.  It found her hair and made of it a crown of bronze and gold.  For a moment it lingered, then climbing, lighted up a yellow parchment hanging on the wall just above.