He was seated half drowsing, when suddenly some influence made him look up and he saw before him a lovely thing. It was Campanula. She had just come out of the house by way of the veranda, and was approaching him. Campanula, far removed from the child he had carried on his shoulder into Nikko five years ago.
The child had turned into a girl with that rapidity of transformation characteristic of the women of Japan. She was taller than the ordinary Mousmé of fourteen or fifteen; her face, even to Western eyes, was beautiful with a sad and mysterious beauty of its own, and her every movement was graceful as the movement of a bluebell when touched by the wind.
She had ceased to attend the mission school after nearly four years’ instruction, during which she had grasped the art of speaking and almost of thinking in English, and was now Leslie’s housekeeper, his adopted daughter, and absolute ruler of the small domain known as the House of the Clouds—as far, that is to say, as the household affairs went.
She still retained her childishness of mind, and for all the Christian endeavor of the missionaries, she still retained much of her pristine belief in “things”—things with wings as well as hoofs, things that lived in woods, birds that talked, and beasts that made answer.
Though she could speak English, she never spoke in long sentences, or told a connected tale in that language, always falling back on the vernacular when her imagination was roused, or a long and connected statement had to be made.
She was approaching Leslie now with a porcelain bowl figured with storks in her hand, and a smile upon her face. There was little mat on the ground near his chair, and on this she sat down—kneeling fashion—with the bowl before her.
“See!” said she, producing some things like small gun wads from the sleeve of her kimono, “I bought these to-day to give you pleasure. Oh, so beautiful! Watch!”
She cast one of the ugly discs upon the surface of the water. It lay there for a moment unchanged, and then, as if by magic, began to expand as it sucked up the fluid, and break up, growing bigger and broader till at last on the surface of the water floated three pink-tinted lotus-flowers, a most delicate and perfect resemblance of the real things.
She folded her hands and looked up at him with a happy smile.
“Where did you get them?” asked Leslie.