"Keep colors. Coming.
"Shijiro Arisuga."
Then Hoshiko went to the house of Moncure Jones for the second time. The place of horror to her. That day she dressed once more in her best kimono,—she had always kept the white one,—and put the new kanzashi again in her hair, (which you will remember Arisuga bought for her the day after she had knocked on his shoji,) and painted her face and eyes to hide their hollowness, and put upon her dainty little body the last of the "flower perfume"—which every Japanese girl saves from her marriage for her burial so that she may appear fittingly as a bride indeed before the gods above. In this matter Jones must be propitiated—made sure. She did not forget their last parting. So she went to him arrayed and adorned as she had once meant to go before the gods.
And she remembered again, and was repeating their last adjuration to fealty as she stepped upon the sill of Jones's door, those forty-seven ronins whose wives lent themselves to harlotry that their husbands might the better achieve their cause. Are they not upon brass to-day, though a thousand years have passed? Are their wives not properly forgotten?
So when she had come to Jones's house she smiled and was very gay, like a woman of joy, as she had often read had been the way of the wives of the forty-seven, and said:—
"You wish me?"
"Wish you!" cried the delighted Jones. "I have never wished for anything so much in all my life. I have never missed any one so much. It was beastly of you to go away in that fashion. I haven't married yet."
Hoshiko was very impatient inside, but outside she smiled.
"You wish me?" she repeated.
"Yes! But that beastly husband of yours, with his knives—"