Nancy departed from the room, calling out laughingly:
"Smarty! Smarty!"
Billie kicked off her slipper after her, and so the quarrel started with good natured raillery. But the memory of the letter lingered in Billie's mind all the morning, although why it should have connected itself with Onoye, who, an hour later, stepped out into the garden on high wooden clogs with an oiled paper umbrella, she could not say. Standing idly by the window, Billie watched the little figure disappear down the path.
"I suppose she's going to visit the Compassionate God again," Billie thought to herself absently. "I hope he'll be compassionate enough to clear the weather by to-morrow."
The next link in the chain of circumstances was forged when Onoye returned from her pilgrimage. Billie, who had drawn a stool to the window and was sitting with her face pressed against the glass, saw her walking slowly along the dripping path to the house. The Japanese girl was looking at something she held in her free hand, an envelope undoubtedly. Just as she reached the piazza, Onoye slipped the letter into the folds of her sash and hurried in.
Billie's mind gave a sudden leap of conjecture but she continued to sit quietly, her face against the window, peering into the mist-hung garden.
"Funny," she said to herself. "It couldn't have been a Japanese letter because those are rolled up on little sticks."
Not long afterwards, she encountered Onoye in the passage. The Japanese girl smiled lovingly into her face. Little by little her feeling for Billie was growing and expanding into a real devotion,
"And I'm sure I don't know why she should caress the hand that smote her," Billie had thought. "She's a dear, faithful little soul."
"Are you quite well again, Onoye?" she asked, pausing and slipping her arm around the Japanese girl's shoulders.