It required me a good hour to reduce him to submission and to sleep.  When I returned to the house Page Hanaford was gone.  I was disappointed enough to cry.  Zura said that the next morning was the time for him to go to the Government office to fill out the papers required for his position at the Normal College, and that he must make his last preparation for this.  He asked her to say to me that he would accept the offer I had made to go with him as interpreter and would call for me on his way down.

“But,” I asked almost peevishly, “what made him go so soon?”

“I am not sure.  Maybe he wanted to study.  Or, it may be, I made his head ache.  I did talk a lot.  I told him everything—­about the babies in the bath and Jane’s sermon and your detective.”

“Oh, Zura!” I said helplessly.

“Yes, I did.  Why not?”

She leaned ’way over and looked at me steadily.  Then with something of her old passion she cried:  “Listen to me, Ursula!  Don’t you dare think Page Hanaford guilty of crime!  There isn’t anything wrong with him.  I know it.  I know it.”

“How do you know it, my child?  Has he told you the real reason for his being in Japan?  Has he told you why fear suddenly overtakes and confuses him?  Or has he only dared to tell you other things?”

A joyous little sob caught in her throat.  “His lips have told me nothing, Ursula.  His eyes and my heart have told me all.”

“And without knowing these things you love him, Zura?”

“Love him,” she echoed softly.  “Right or wrong, I love him absolutely!”

I looked at the girl in amazed wonder.  There seemed to be an inner radiance as if her soul had been steeped in some luminous medium.  She came nearer, her young face held close to mine.  “Oh, I am so happy, so blissfully happy!  For good or not, it’s love for eternity.  Dear, kind old friend!”—­inclosing my face with her hands, she kissed me on the lips.  In that faraway time of my babyhood my mother’s good-by kiss was the last I had known.  The rapture of the girl’s caress repaid long, empty years.  For a moment I was as happy as she.  Then I remembered.

All day I had seen love perform miracles, and, like some invisible power, regulate the workings of life as some deft hand might guide a piece of delicate machinery; but that anybody could be happy, radiantly happy, with shadows and detectives closing around the main cause of happiness was farther than I could stretch my belief in the transforming power of joy.  Surely this thing called “love” was either farseeing wisdom or shortsighted foolishness.

XVII

A VISIT TO THE KENCHO