So we compromised for a while at least.  She would stay with me, and I would not interfere with her work in the crime section, nor give way to remarks on the subject.

I was sure the conditions in the Quarter would prove impossible, but as some people cannot be convinced unless permitted to draw their own diagram of failure, it was best for her to try when she was able to make the effort.

The making of an extra room in a Japanese house is only a matter of shifting a paper screen or so into a ready-made groove.  It took me some time to decide whether I should screen off Jane in the corner that commanded a full view of the wonderful sea, or at the end where by sliding open the paper doors she could step at once into the fairy land of my garden.

Jane decided it herself.  I discovered her stretched in an old wheel-chair before the open doors, looking into the sun-flooded greenery of the garden, and heard her softly repeating,

    “Fair as plumes of dreams
      In a land
    Where only dreams come true,
    And flutes of memory waken
      Longings forgotten.”

Any one who felt that way about my garden had a right to live close to it.

In half an hour Jane was established.  My enthusiasm waned a bit the next day when I found all the pigeons in the neighborhood fluttering about the open door, fearlessly perching on the invalid’s lap and shoulders while she fed them high-priced rice and dainty bits of dearly-bought chicken.

I dispersed the pigeons with a flap of my apron and with forced mildness protested.  “I’m obliged to ask you to be less generous.  The price of rice is higher than those pigeons can fly and, as for chicken, it’s about ten sen a feather.  There’s abundant food for you; but we cannot afford to feed all the fowls of the air.”

“Oh! dear Miss Jenkins, I couldn’t drive them away.  The cunning things!  Every coo they uttered sounded like a love word.”

I hoped it was the patient’s physical weakness, and not a part of her nature.

I could not possibly survive a steady diet of emotion so tender that it bubbled over at the flutter of a pigeon’s wing.

I’d brought it on myself, however, and I was determined to share my home and my life with Jane Gray.  Sentimental and visionary as she was, with the funny little twist in her tongue, the poor excuse of a body seemed the last place power of any kind would choose for a habitation.  I was not disposed to attribute the supernatural to my companion, but from the day of her arrival unusual events popped up to speak for themselves.

A nearby volcano, asleep for half a century, blew off its cap, covering land and sea with ashes and fiery lava.  All my pink roses bloomed weeks earlier than they had any business to, and for the first time in years my old gardener got drunk.  Between dashes of cold water on his head he tearfully wailed my unexpressed sentiments, in part: