They had no need of lanterns to show the way up the hill-path to the House of the Clouds; the path was a tangle of moonlight and lilac-bough shadows, a tremulous carpet upon which above them they perceived a creeping and colored thing.
It was Cherry-blossom. She, too, had been at the festival at the O Suwa, and was now returning, wearied out and walking like a somnambulist, a lantern painted with butterflies held before her nodding at the end of a bamboo cane.
In the house, when he had fastened the shoji and taken his night lantern from Pine-breeze, he turned to where Campanula was standing, a vague figure in the dimly-lit room. Yielding to a sudden impulse he picked her up from the ground, just as he might have picked up a child, and kissed her—kissed her just as he had kissed her when she was a child that day, years ago, in the valley by the Nikko road.
That night sleep was impossible. The lights of the O Suwa burned before him, the perfume of the azaleas and cryptomerias pursued him, lighting always and leading him always to the same image—Jane.
He lay considering what the future would be when Jane was gone; the rainy season would soon be upon them, and then the autumn and the winter and the spring again after that, and the years to come.
Whilst thus torturing his soul his mind was steadfastly making a resolve. A resolve that, come what might, Jane must not go out of his life. That to-morrow he must act in such a way as to make her for ever his own.
Come what might!
There was no time left for thought, scarcely enough for action.
He had quite ceased to battle with himself, to say this is right or this is wrong. Time had cut all these arguments short with the command: “Act now, now, in the next twenty-four hours! for after that your chance is gone.”
Then he began to sketch out the plan that had been vaguely forming in his brain all the evening—a plan that the villainous conduct of George du Telle made possible and practicable, and, to Leslie’s mind, almost plausible.