“O Toku San is dead,” said she; “I have just left her.” She spoke gravely, but without any sorrow in her voice; one might even have imagined that she was referring to some good fortune that had fallen on O Toku San; and perhaps, indeed, she was.
“Ay! puir thing, is she?” said Mac, whose mind was also astray.
He asked had Leslie returned, and Campanula told him that he had gone to a garden-party at Omura, and would not return till evening.
“He is going away,” finished Campanula, pausing on the veranda steps and unlatching the strap of her sandal.
“Oh! so he’s told you?” said Mac.
Campanula said nothing; possibly she did not hear the question, so absorbed was she by her own ideas and thoughts. Suddenly she said, turning to Mac, who was leaning his shoulder against the veranda post and feeling in his pocket for his tobacco-pouch:
“I saw the Blind One to-day as I was leaving O Toku San’s. I did not speak to him; he spoke to me. He said the master of the house on the heights is going on a journey from whence he will not return. Then he went away. A wind from the hill blew my kimono apart and a chill came to my breast. I do not know who the Blind One is—perhaps he is Death.”
M’Gourley, as she spoke, noticed that she had refolded her kimono from right to left instead of from left to right.
Now in Japan, the only people who wear their kimonos folded from right to left are the dead.
He felt sick and shivery at the words she had just spoken, and he could not reply to them or ask questions; he was filled with a horror of the subject, a dead, blind terror of it. He looked down and said gruffly: