"Oh, no! He lives quite alone. He has one of the loveliest private gardens in the city. Sometimes one doesn't see him for months, but he is here now."
She was silent, while he looked again at the white toe of the slipper peeping from a gauzy hem. The silence seemed to him an added bond between them. The moon, tilting its slim sickle along the solemn range of western hills, touched their jagged contour with a shimmering radiance and edged with silver the vast white apparition towering, filmily exquisite, above them, a solitary snowy cone, hovering wraith-like between earth and sky. The horizon opposite was deep violet, crowded with tiny stars, like green-gilt coals. In the quiet a drowsy crow croaked huskily from the hillside. Barbara looked through dreamy eyes.
"It can't always be so beautiful!" she said at length. "Nothing could, I am sure."
"No, indeed," he agreed cheerfully. "There are times when, as my number-one boy says, 'honorable weather are disgust.' In June the nubai, the rainy season, is due. It will pour buckets for three weeks without a stop and frogs will sing dulcet songs in the streets. In July your head feels as if a red-hot feather pillow had been stuffed into your skull and everybody moves to Chuzenji or Kamakura. If it weren't for that, and an occasional dust-storm in the winter, and the centillions of mosquitoes, and a weekly earthquake or two, we wouldn't half appreciate this!" He made a wide gesture.
"Yet now," she said softly, "it seems too lovely to be real! I shall wake presently to find myself in my berth on the Tenyo Maru with Japan two or three days off."
He fell into her mood. "We are both asleep. That was why the dog vanished so queerly. Dream-dogs always do. And I don't wonder at my singing, either. People do exactly what they shouldn't when they are asleep. But no! I really don't like the dream version at all. I want this to be true."
"Why?"
Her tone was low, but it made him tingle. A sudden mêlée of daring, delicious impulses swept over him. "Because I have dreamed too much," he said, in as low a voice. "Here in the East the habit grows on one; we dream of what all the beauty somehow misses—for us. But to-night, at least, is real. I shall have it to remember when you have gone, as I—I suppose you will be soon."
She leaned out and picked a slender maple-leaf from a branch that came in through the open side of the pagoda, and, holding it in her fingers, turned toward him. Her lips were parted, as if to speak. But suddenly she tossed it from her, rose and shook out her skirts with a laugh. Carriage-wheels were rolling up the drive from the lower gate.
"Thank you!" she cried gaily. "But no hint shall move me. I warn you that I intend to stay a long time!"