He left the room, feeling by the walls like a man without sight.
Outside, the world was in utter darkness. More clouds had rolled up over the sky, as if called by the Blind One, the tapping of whose stick betrayed him, as he walked, waiting for his prey.
If he could find her, what cared he for the Blind One! If he could not find her he felt that he would be for ever lost. But he could never find her more, for the opium sleep was falling upon him now. He had no more strength to fight it, and the darkness of the pit lay around him.
Suddenly, the night wind changed, and brought him the perfume of the unseen azaleas, and with the perfume a thin thread of song.
It was the song of the mushi—the atom of life he had spared that day in his fury, even as God might now be sparing him—the mushi she had loved so well. Feeling by the veranda wall, he followed the song like a man led by a thread, and as he came he crushed something beneath his foot: it was the lath, whose sound would never trouble him again.
He felt the azalea bushes around his knees, and advanced amongst them, still led by the tremulous song, till his foot touched something soft, and his hand a tiny cage, hanging to one of the crimson-flowering boughs.
CHAPTER XXXV
BON MATSURI