“Burton, our grief is a common one. I swear by everything I hold sacred and holy that I will never cease in my efforts to find my wife! Nothing that strength or money can do shall be spared. I will take no rest till she is found. Before God, I will right this wrong I have unconsciously done you and yours—and mine!”

Taro’s eyes, wide and bright, fixed Jack’s steadfastly. His long, thin hand stirred and quivered, and attempted to raise itself. Without a word Jack took it in his own. He had understood that mute effort to mean belief and confidence in him. And, kneeling there in the melancholy dusk, he held Taro’s hand between his own until it was stiff and cold.

Whither had the soul of the Eurasian drifted? Out and along the interminable and winding journey to the Meido of his maternal ancestors, or to give an account of itself to the great Man-God-three-in-one-Creator of his father?

The mother crept from the shrine with stealing step, her white face like a mask of death, her small, frail hands outstretched, like those of one gone blind.

A consciousness of her eerie approach thrilled Jack Bigelow. He dropped Taro’s hand and turned towards her, standing before and hiding the sight of the dead from her. In the dim shadows of the deepening twilight she looked as frail and ethereal as a wraith, for she had clothed herself in all the vestal garments of the dead.

With somewhat of the heroism of her feudal ancestors Omatsu had prepared herself to face and undertake that perilous journey into the unknown with her son. In the pitiful tangled reasoning that had wrestled in the bosom of this Japanese woman, always there had disturbed the beauty of such a sacrifice the doubt as to whether the gods would indeed receive her with this son of hers who had dedicated his soul to an alien and strange God. But she had prepared herself to risk the consequences. And now she stood there swaying and tottering in all her ghastly attire, while opposite to her stood the tall, fair-haired foreigner with the pitying gray eyes of her own dead lord.

She essayed to speak, but her voice was barely above a parched whisper.

“Anata?” (Thou). It was a gentle word, spoken as a question, as though she would ask him, “Condescend to speak your honorable desire with me?”

“Mother!” he only said—“dear mother!”