CHAPTER VIII.
It is nearly a month since our night of pleasure at the temple fête of the thousands of lanterns, and I have been in terrible trouble.
Something has happened to Mousmé, and till that catastrophe—to me it seemed nothing less—I never realized what she was to me.
It was so sudden.
I had left her in the morning, bright as the sunshine which forced its way through the bamboo and paper shoji, and, filtering thus, fell in golden, thread-like rays like spun silk upon the floor. The last I saw of her was a tiny figure upon the balcony as I turned the corner of the road, blowing kisses to me with one hand, and waving a huge bunch of crimson lotus in the other, flowers we had just gathered together in the sun-bathed garden.
And in three or four hours all this was altered, obliterated.
I climbed up from the town leisurely, taking the shady side of the road, and availing myself to the full of every shadow cast by the trees or by the queer old villas with their mossy roofs and eccentric architecture. If I had but known, how my steps would have hastened!
Arrived at the wicket, I cannot see even a flutter of Mousmé’s dress to-day. She is usually awaiting my return in the shady corner of the verandah with her samisen, or with a pile of books at her side, from which she has been trying to spell out the words in big print.
I walk up the path, which is flower-bordered, and alive with bees whose humming sounds are like the deeper notes of an Æolian harp, and across the garden where dragon-flies flit, iridescent shuttles weaving their colours, blue, green and yellow, into the sunlit air, darting between the little ponds in which gold-fish hide from the sunlight beneath the tranquil floating lotus-leaves.
I enter the house. Everything is strangely still.