"Something has happened," she said. "What can it be?"
He made no reply. There had flashed to him a quick realization of the position in which, unwittingly, they had placed themselves. She must not be seen at such an hour, in that lonely spot with him! He knew the canons of the world he lived in! With a hushed word he drew her back into the shadow.
The voices were speaking in Japanese, and now he heard them clearly. "Some one is injured," he told her. "He fell down the hillside, they think." A hurried step crossed the bridge, and a voice, sharp and peremptory, asked a question in nervous English. Daunt chilled at the answer, turning to her, every unselfish instinct alive to spare her.
But she had heard a name. "It is Mr. Ware who is hurt!"
He grasped her wrist. "Wait!" he said hurriedly. "I beg you to go by the upper path to the side door." But she caught away her arm and ran quickly down the path.
Daunt sprang up the hill, skirted the building, gained its upper corridor, now simmering with excitement, and crossed the bridge. Near its farther end a small group stood about a figure, prostrate beside the phonograph whose cylinder gleamed in the lantern-light. By it Barbara was kneeling.
But something came between her gaze and the pallid face—something which she saw with the distinctness of a black paper silhouette on a white ground: a glimmering object, unnoted by the rest, which had lain half-concealed by a bush—something that one day, a thousand years ago, had glittered against Daunt's brown hair as he saluted her from his horse! It was a riding-crop, whose Damascene handle bore the device of a fox's head.
Two hours later the corridors were silent and the bishop and Daunt sat together in the darkened office, saying few words, both thinking of a man lying straight and alone—and of a girl in an upper room whose promise he had taken with him out of the world. Daunt was to leave for Tokyo on the early morning train. Half the night through he sat there listening to the moan of the rising weather.
But a little while before the sky whitened to a rainy dawn, a gray wraith glided along the upper piazza of the hotel. It crossed the foot-bridge to the hillside.