"You so—much clever!" she laughed. "No all same Japan man. He ve-ree stupid! My think you mos' bes' clever man in these whole worl', to goin' find so much money—né?"
With a savage elation he drew her close in his arms. The great spiral of her headdress drooped under his caresses, and the blue-black hair fell all about the white face.
CHAPTER XXXV
WHEN A WOMAN DREAMS
Riding with Patricia in the big victoria next day, its red-striped runner diving ahead, Barbara forgot her vague wonder at Haru's disappearance, as she felt the enchanted mystery of Tokyo creep further into her heart. They threaded the softly dreaming silence of the willow-bordered moat that clasps the Imperial grounds with a girdle of cloudy emerald, where the "Dragon Pines" of the great Shogun Iyemits fling their craggy masses of olive-green down over the leaning walls to kiss the mirroring water—past many-roofed, Tartar-like watch-towers, cream-white on the blue, and through little parks with forests of thin straight-boled trees and placid lotos ponds seething with the dagger-blue flashings of dragon-flies, all woven together into a tapestry, lovely, remote, fantastic—like the projection of some dream-legend whose people lived a fairy story in a picture-book world.
On this oriental background continually appeared quaint touches of the foreign and bizarre: a huge American straw hat, much befrilled and befeathered, on the head of a baby strapped to its mother's back, or a hideous boa of chenille like bunched caterpillars marring the delicate native neckwear of an exquisite kimono.
On the slope of a hill they came on a motley crowd, which included a sprinkling of foreigners, gathered before the entrance of a temple yard, where a rough, improvised amphitheater had been erected. Patricia called to the driver, and he pulled up.
"Fire-walk," said the betto. "Ontaké temple."
From their elevated seat they could see white-robed and barefooted priests waving long-handled fans and wands topped with shaggy paper tassels over an area of red-hot cinders. Presently some of them strode calmly across the smoking mass.