“The ladies of the court would honorably like their pictures painted?” she essayed almost timidly.
“I do not paint,” he said. “I am but a sculptor.”
They walked slowly up the pebbled path, and through the bamboo grove, until they came to the little gate over which he had stepped.
“Now we have reached the wall,” she said with childish lightness. “You are not so brave nowadays, I fancy, as to carry me across by force.”
He vaulted to the other side without speaking, then stood a moment, looking back at her.
“Yet,” she said, almost tremulously, “the wall is not so high or stone.”
“It has the power to divide, O princess,” he replied in a husky voice.
“Now you are at the other side, you are no longer Kamura Junzo,” she said. “You have become changed from the little boy I once knew. You are cruel now—and—and—cold.”
“And you,” he said, “as far away and unattainable as the stars, O princess.”
“Yet you are betrothed to one whom you called Masago,” she said suddenly, and raised an almost appealing face to his. He looked into her eyes and did not speak.