HIROSHIMA.
My dear Best Girl:
If ever a sailor needed a compass, I need the level head that tops your loving heart. I am worried hollow-eyed and as useless as a brass turtle.
It has been days since I heard from Jack. When he last wrote, he was going to some remote district out from Mukden. I dare not think what might happen to him. Says he must travel to the very source of the trouble.
If Jack really wanted trouble he could find it nearer home. Is n't it like him, though, with his German education, to hunt a thing to its lair? I suppose when next I hear from him, he will have disappeared into some marmot hole at the foot of a tree in a Siberian forest.
Sada is here. A pale shadow of her former radiant self. She is in deadly fear of what Uncle has written he expects of her when she returns.
For the first few days of her visit, she was like an escaped prisoner. She played and sang with the girls. The joy of her laughter was contagious. Everybody fell a victim to her gaiety. We have been on picnics up the river in a sampan where we waded and fished, then landed on an island of bamboo and fern and cooked our dinner over a hibachi. We have had concerts, tableaux and charades, here at the school, with a big table for the stage and a silver moon and a green mosquito-net for the scenery.
In every pastime or pleasure, Sada San has been the moving spirit. Adorably girlish and winning in her innocent joy, I grow faint to think of the rude awakening.
She has talked much of Miss West and their life together; their work and simple pleasures.
To the older woman she poured out unmeasured affection, fresh and sweet. Susan made a flower garden of the girl's heart, where, if even a tiny weed sprouted it was coaxed into a blossom. But she gave no warning of the savage storms that might come and lay the garden waste.