He started. His face turned a gray-green. He drew back and stealthily turned his head.
But the Japanese did not seem to have noticed the silence. With the tray in his hands, he was looking fixedly at the feathery sprays of reddish-yellow dust on the polished top of the desk.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE FORGOTTEN MAN
Barbara pushed open the bamboo gate of the temple garden, then paused. The recluse with whom she had talked yesterday sat a little way inside, while before him, in an attitude of deepest attention, stood the diminutive figure on the huge clogs whose morning acquaintance she had made from her window. Thorn was looking at him earnestly with his great myopic eye, through a heavy glass mounted with a handle like a lorgnette.
"My son," he said. "Why will you persist in eating amé, when I have taught you the classics and the true divinity of the universe? It is too sweet for youthful teeth. One of these days you will be carried to a dentist, an esteemed person with horrible tools, prior to the removal of a small hell, containing several myriads of lost souls, from the left side of your lower jaw!"
Barbara's foot grated on a pebble and he rose with a startled quickness. The youngster bent double, his face preternaturally grave. Thorn thrust the glass into his sleeve and smiled.
"I am experimenting on this oriental raw material," he said, "to illustrate certain theories of my own. Ishikichi-San, though a slave to the sweetmeat dealer, is a learned infant. He can write forty Chinese characters and recite ten texts of Mencius. He also knows many damnable facts about figures which they teach in school. He has just propounded a question that Confucius was too wise to answer: 'Why is poverty?' Not being so wise as the Chinese sage, I attempted its elucidation. Thus endeth our lesson to-day, Ishikichi. Sayonara."
He bowed. The child ducked with a jerky suddenness that sent his round, battered hat rolling at Barbara's feet. She picked it up and set it on the shaven head.