“Yes,” she said, her eyes quite wide with this new terror in her heart. “It was Tsuda who brought me here. He told me I’d be safe. There were times before.... But he said this would be a sanctuary, and that I’d be quite safe with the gods. You have to know Tsuda to understand all this.”
“But you could not have known Tsuda, really,” observed Jerome with narrowness of tone, his voice grown steady and cool now, and a shade aloof.
“He seemed to be my only friend,” she said miserably. “Oh, Jerome—if you knew everything.... As for the motive—it’s too hideously plain, isn’t it? Tsuda arranged to have offerings brought up in the evening. It was a part of his religious observances. His brother was a priest, and Tsuda would have been a priest too....” There was a wildly monotonous quality in her speech. She was wringing her hands.
They were silent a moment, and then, seeming to grasp the completeness of the irony, he muttered: “Those very offerings that kept life in your body were part of a ritual over your death...!”
She shuddered. “It was the grave of one of the Ainu! I asked Tsuda why they were heaping flowers on it, and he said it was a part of their religion—because the man had been brought to his death by a spell....”
“If I hadn’t come here tonight,” said Jerome, solemn and scarcely breathing, “the Star of Troy might have sailed off again without your knowing!”
She gave a little sharp terrified cry, and he saw that the matter must not be enlarged upon. Nevertheless, in his own mind conjecture played with all the lurid possibilities. Even had Utterbourne taken it into his head to come and look upon the grave, Tsuda would have taken good care the girl in the temple knew nothing of it. He saw Tsuda creeping up here very early in the morning and putting her to sleep with something. Tsuda.... The Star of Troy would have steamed off. And after that....
But he merely asked, with an inflection of grimness, out of the silence:
“Are you the only white woman here?”
“Yes, Jerome, the only one.”