When the place had been cleared and the basket was half full of victims, the question came how to dispose of them. Impossible to throw them away or burn them; she would as soon, almost, have treated children so.
She stood at the gate undecided, till suddenly there came the solution of the problem, and opening the gate she passed down the lilac-shaded path to Nagasaki. On the way she saw more bluebells and stopped to pluck them, so that when the lane at the bottom was reached the basket was nearly full.
In a rabbit-hutch of a house off the lane lay a tragedy, or the remains of one, in the form of O Toku San, a poor work-girl. She had loved a man, and he had not even betrayed her in the ordinary way. He had simply changed his mind, and gone off with another girl.
She tried to kill herself, not in the native way, but with some abominable sort of foreign poison—Oxalic acid, most likely; but they saved her life, and she lay in the hospital nearly a month with her hands tied, to prevent her trying to kill herself again.
When she came out of the hospital she made no more attempts to obtain peace. She was in the clutches of pernicious anæmia, and she now lay dying, a despairing shadow, the ghost of what had once been a pretty and happy girl.
Campanula turned to the tiny house, and that day O Toku San had a whole silver yen to give to her mother on her return, and a bunch of freshly-gathered blue flowers to charm her eye: things to the dying better than all music and poetry, and far above the greatest masterpieces of art.
CHAPTER XIX
THE STORK AND THE TORTOISE