Ingigerd, moved perhaps by a little wave of jealousy, came up and asked Frederick, without suspecting the significance the question had in his eyes, whether he had packed his things.

“Not yet.  Why should I pack my things?”

“Mr. Lilienfeld,” she said, “has made a contract for me for two evenings a week in Boston.  You must get ready and go to Boston with me day after to-morrow.”

“To the ends of the world,” said Frederick lightly, “to the ends of the world, dear lady.”

She was contented, and gave Mrs. Lilienfeld a look of satisfaction.

XXII

Frederick was greatly relieved when the festivity at Lilienfeld’s house was at last a thing of the past.  With Willy Snyders’ help, he had succeeded in getting together a few effects, and he spent part of the afternoon arranging them.  In the evening the artists, who had grown very fond of their guest and were sorry to lose him, gave him a farewell dinner at the round table.

For a long time Frederick had not felt so serene and at peace with himself and the world as that afternoon.  After he had got his baggage ready, Willy Snyders, who had been waiting ever since Frederick’s arrival to show him his collection of Japanese art objects, invited him to his room.  It was a small room on the top floor, cluttered up with a mass of antiques.  He first placed before Frederick a number of Japanese sword-guards, tsubas, as the Japanese call them, small elliptical pieces of metal, about which a man’s hand can easily reach.  They are decorated with figures in slight relief, partly of the same metal as the ground, partly damascened, or inlaid with copper, gold, or silver.

“A tiny object, tremendous labour,” Frederick observed, after more than an hour spent in admiring the wonderful workmanship of pieces in the Kamakura and Namban styles, pieces by members of the Goto family extending over centuries, of the Jakushi family, and the Kinai family; pieces of the Akasaka school and the Nara school; pieces from Fushimi in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Gokinai and Kagonami; glorious sword-guards in the maru-bori, maru-bori-zogan, and hikone-bori styles; pieces of the Hamano family, and so on.  Who can boast a prouder aristocracy than Goto Mitsunori, who lived at the end of the nineteenth century and could trace his descent back through a line of sixteen ancestors, all great masters in the art of sword-decorating, a glorious race of craftsmen, inheriting not only the life, but also the skill of their fore-fathers.

And all the things portrayed on those small oval tsubas!  The cloven turnip of Daikoku, god of fortune.  The god Sennin creating a man by his breath.  A shining full moon and flying geese.  Wild geese flying over reeds.  The moon rising from between snow-clad mountains, an oval of iron, gold and silver, no larger than a man’s palm, yet suggesting the vast reaches of a moonlit night.