She had taken this dull, hard-grained, and shady old business man into a byway, of life, and made him spin tops and fly kites. She had made him admire flowers and listen to fairy tales, and all as naturally and as peacefully as though these things had been matters of everyday occurrence with him the whole long length of his arid life.
“Einst, O wunder!”—that ballad might have been inspired by Mac—had the writer ever met him in business or seen him in the flesh.
“Hech!” said Mac. “There you are; and where have you been trapsing to this hour of the evening?”
Campanula explained that Leslie had met friends, and that he had gone to dine with them at the hotel.
“Wonder who they can be?” soliloquized Mac, as Campanula clapped her little hands together for Pine-breeze to bring refreshments. “Some people he has picked up at the hotel, maybe.”
They sat opposite to each other on the matting, this strangely assorted pair. A panel in the front was open, for the night was warm, and the lamplight fell on the veranda and the garden path beyond.
And they ate salted plums and crystallized prawns, soup with seaweed in it, and rice with fish sauce, whilst the perfume of the cherry blossoms stole in from the night outside, and the twang of a chamécen came from somewhere in the mysterious depths of the house.
It was Lotus-bud relieving her soul with music, mournful as the sound of the wind blowing over the wet fields of millet in the rainy weather.
The things having been removed, Campanula brought forth a chess-board, which she laid on the matting before Mac.
He had taught her chess, and had found her an apt pupil, a veritable Zukertort, a female Nogi, who attacked his positions with her ivory army, stormed his fortifications, and put him to rout when she chose.