"You wished to see me. What can I do for you?"
Sunny extended the letter. When he took it from her hand, his face came somewhat nearer to hers, and the closer he saw that young girl's face, the greater grew his agitation.
"What is your name?" he demanded abruptly.
"Sunny," said the girl simply, little dreaming that she was speaking the name that the man before her had himself invented for her seventeen and a half years before.
The word touched some electrical cord within him. He started violently forward in his seat, half arising, and the letter in his hand dropped on the table before him face up. A moment of gigantic self-control, and then with fingers that shook, Stephen Wainwright slipped the envelope open. The words swam before him, but not till they were indelibly printed upon the man's conscience-stricken heart. Through blurred vision he read the message from the dead to the living.
"On this sixth day of the Season of Little Plenty. A thousand years of joy. It is your honourable daughter, who knows not your name, who brings or sends to you this my letter. I go upon the long journey to the Meido. I send my child to him through whom she has her life. Sayonara. Haru-no."
For a long, long time the man sat with his two hands gripped before him on the desk, steadily looking at the girl before him, devouring every feature of the well-remembered face of the child he had always loved. It seemed to him that she had changed not at all. His little Sunny of those charming days of his youth had that same crystal look of supreme innocence, a quality of refinement, a fragrance of race that seemed to reach back to some old ancestry, and put its magic print upon the exquisite young face. He felt he must have been blind not to have recognised his own child the instant his eye had fallen upon her. He knew now what that warm rush of emotion had meant when he had looked at her in that outer office. It was the intuitive instinct that his own child was near—the only child he had ever had. By exercising all the self-control that he could command, he was at last able to speak her name, huskily.
"Sunny, don't you remember me?"
Like her father, Sunny was addicted to moments of abstraction. She had allowed her gaze to wander through the window to the harbour below, where she could see the great ships at their moorings. It made her think of the one she had come to America on, and the one on which Jerry had sailed away from Japan. Painfully, wistfully, she brought her gaze back to her father's face. At his question she essayed a little propitiating smile.