After he had looked at her a moment, she subsided to the mats and made her prostration. She was dressed very gayly in a red crêpe kimono, tied about with a purple obi. Her hair was dressed after the fashion of the geisha, with a flower ornament at top and long, pointed daggers at either side; but as she bowed her head to the mats, some pin in her hair escaped and slipped, and then a tawny, rebellious mass of hair, which was never meant to be worn smoothly, had fallen all about her, tumbled into her eyes and over her ears, and literally covered her little crouching form. She shivered in shame at the mishap, and then knelt very still at his feet.

Bigelow was speechless. Never before in his life had he seen such hair. It was black, though not densely so, for all over it, even where it had been darkened with oil, there was a rich red tinge, and it was luxuriously thick and long and wavy.

“Good heavens!” he said, after the little figure had remained absolutely motionless for a full minute; “she’ll hurt or cramp herself in that position.”

The girl did not rise at the sound of his voice, but crept nearer to him, her hair still enshrouding her. It made him feel creepy, and annoyed and pleased and amused him altogether.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Please stand up. Do!”

The nakoda told him to lift her to her feet, and the young man did so, entangling his hands in her hair. When she stood up, he saw her face, which was oval and rosy, the lips very red. She still drooped her eyes, so that her face was incomplete.

“What’s your name?” he asked her, gently. “And what do you want with me?”

Now she raised her head and he saw her eyes. They startled him. They were large, though narrow, and intensely, vividly blue. Before, with her hair neatly smoothed and dressed, he had noticed nothing extraordinary about her; now, with that rich red-black hair enshrouding her, and the long, blue eyes looking at him mistily, she was an eerie little creature that made him marvel. A Japanese girl with such hair and eyes! And yet the more he looked at her the more he saw that her clothes became her; that she was Japanese despite the hair and eyes. He did not try to explain the anomaly to himself, but he could not doubt her nationality. There was no other country she could belong to.

“You are Japanese?” he finally asked, to make sure.

She nodded.