In her pocket was a letter. It had been brought to her that morning when she woke and she had read it over and over, kneeling in the drift of pillows, her red-gold hair draping her white shoulders, thrilling, murmuring little inarticulate answers to its phrases, looking up now and then to peer through the bamboo sudaré to the white and green cottage across the lawn. He would not see her to-day—until evening. Then he would ask her....
As the carriage bore her on, she whispered again and again one of the sentences he had written: "There has never been another woman to me, Barbara. There never will be! My Lady of the Many-Colored Fires!"
CHAPTER XXXVI
BEHIND THE SHIKIRI
Mr. Y. Nakajima, the almond-eyed guide of gold-filled teeth, came to the end of his elaborate conversation. He turned from the old servant, leaning on his pruning knife, and spoke to the man who stood waiting outside the wistaria-gate in the Street-of-the-Misty-Valley.
"He say Mr. Philip Ware stay here," he announced, "but house is ownerships of his friend, Mr. Daunt, of America Embassy. He regret sadly that no one are not at home."
Ware reflected. Daunt's house? He lived in the Embassy compound—so they had said at dinner last night. Why should he maintain this native house in another quarter of Tokyo? There came to his mind that hackneyed phrase "the custom of the country," the foreigner's specious justification of the modern "Madame Butterfly." In this interminable city, with its labyrinthine mazes, who could tell what this or that gray roof might shelter? Was this a nook enisled, for pretty Japanese romances "under the rose"? He had loaned it to Phil—they were friends.
Ware struck his stick hard against the hedge. He scarcely knew what thought had entered his mind, so nebulous was it, so indefinable. If he had thought to use this discovery, he knew no way; if it was Daunt's covert, here was Phil in possession.
"Ask him if he has any idea where he is."