“Mr. Channing told us last night at the hotel. He’s a friend of yours. He told us he knew an Englishman named Richard Leslie living in the native fashion, and I asked him if he was good-looking and tall and dark, and he said, ‘Yes.’ He said you lived at the House of the Clouds—sounds like an address in a dream, doesn’t it?—so we took rikshas and came.”
She put her hand to her back, where the “floor stitch” had seized her. The floor may be a convenient enough resting-place for a Mousmé who sinks down upon it quite naturally in the likeness of a compressed and joyously colored Z, but for an English woman of five feet eight or more, dressed in a tailor-made gown, and laced in a corset parfait it is at first rather difficult.
“I would have got chairs,” said Leslie, “if I had known you were coming; but of all the people of the world, you were the last I expected to see. Where did you come from? I mean, how did you strike Nagasaki?”
“We came from Colombo.”
“Beastly hole,” put in her husband, who was stroking Sweetbriar San, the cat of the establishment, who had just come in to inspect the strangers. “We stayed at the Beach Hotel two nights, and d’you know what they charged us? Just think.”
“Don’t think,” said Jane, who had wriggled into a more comfortable attitude. “Give me that cat, George; and I wish you would try to repress your hotel bills. Dick, I was so sorry to hear the news about your father.”
“What news?”
“About his death.”
“Well, you were sorrier than I was.”
“Oh, Dick! but don’t let us talk about it, it’s all so sad. And have you been living here in Japan ever since?”