What do you want me to do?... The words wove oddly with the refrain. Why should he say them over and over? Again and again it came—an echo of an echo—and again and again he seemed to see the look in the expert's hollow, cat-like eyes! It haunted him as he walked on toward Aoyama parade-ground, to the little house in Kasumigatani Cho, the "Street-of-the-Misty-Valley."
Then, as he walked, he saw some one that for the moment drove it from his mind. He had turned for a short-cut through a temple inclosure, and there he met her face to face—the girl of the matsuri, whom he had seen wading in the foam at Kamakura. Her slim neck, pale with rice-powder, rose from a soft white neckerchief flowered with gold, and a scarlet poppy was dreaming in her black hair. Phil's face sprang red, and a wave of warm color overran her own.
"O-Haru-San!" he cried.
"Konichi-wa," she answered with grave courtesy and made to pass him, but he turned and walked by her side. "Please, please!" he entreated. "If you only knew how often I have looked for you! Don't be unkind!"
"Why you talk with me?" said Haru, turning. "My Japanese girl—no all same your country."
"You wild, pretty thing!" he said. "Why are you so afraid of me? Foreigners don't eat butterflies."
"No," she answered, without hesitation, "they jus' break wings."
He laughed unevenly. Her quickness of retort delighted him, and her beauty was stinging his blood. He put out his hand and touched her sleeve, but she drew away hurriedly:
"See!" she said. "My know those people to come in gate. Talk—'bout my papa-San—please, so they will to think he have know you, né?"
Phil obeyed the hint, but Haru's cheeks, as she saluted her friends, were flushing painfully. It was her first subterfuge employed in a moment of embarrassment with the realization that her home was near and that she was violating the code of deportment that from babyhood hedges about the young Japanese girl with a complicated etiquette.