He shut his teeth. The camelia had always been Barbara's favorite flower!
Meanwhile the girl thus incongruously in his thought had felt a gray shadow across her sunshine. She found her uncle greatly perplexed and troubled. Haru's Bible, found on the Chapel doorstep, had been brought to him that morning. He had sent at once to the Street-of-Prayer-to-the-Gods and the messenger had returned with news of her disappearance. The fact that she had taken clothing with her showed that the flight was a deliberate one.
It pained him to think what the return of the book and the little cross might mean. In his long residence in Japan the bishop had grown accustomed to strange dénouements, to flashing revelations of subtle deeps in oriental character. But save for one instance of many years ago—which the sight of Barbara must always recall to him—he had never been more saddened than by to-day's disclosure. What he told her had left Barbara with an uneasy apprehension. She drove away pondering. The anxious speculation blurred the glamour of the afternoon.
The homeward course took her through Aoyama, by unfrequented streets of pleasant, suburban-like gardens and small houses with roofs of fluted tile as softly gray as silk. Here and there a bean-curd peddler droned his cry of "To-o-fu! To-o-fu-u!" and under a spreading kiri tree a blind beggar squatted, playing a flute through his nostrils, while his wife, also blind and with a beady-eyed baby strapped to her back, twanged a samisen beside him. In the road groups of little girls were playing games with much clapping of hands and shouting in shrill voices.
In one of the cross-streets a dozen coolies strode, carrying flaming white banners painted in red idiographs. The last bore a huge papier-maché bottle—an advertisement of a popular brand of beer. A brass band of four pieces, discoursing hideously tuneless sounds, led them, and between band and banners stalked a grotesquely clad figure on stilts ten feet tall, the shafts pantalooned so that his legs seemed to have been drawn out like India-rubber. The spidery pedestrian was followed by a score of staring children of all ages and sizes.
Suddenly Barbara rose to her feet in the carriage. She had seen a girl emerge from a small temple and turn into a side street.
"Fast! Drive fast, Taka," she called quickly. "The street to the left!" He obeyed, but a soba-ya had halted his shining copper cart of steaming buckwheat, and momentarily delayed them.
The hastening figure was farther away when they rounded the turning. Barbara clasped her hands together. "It was Haru! It was Haru! I am sure!" she whispered.
The girl slipped through a gateway hung with wistaria. As Barbara sprang to the ground she was hurrying through the garden.