He was content merely to gaze at her, though it troubled him that she no longer smiled. She said in a very stricken voice:
“August food also good for Tojin-san. Bud, alas! I god nudding bud rice! Thas good enough for Tama—bud nod for you, Tojin-san.”
Even in his weakness he laughed joyously at the mere notion of food fit for her being unfit for him, and at the sound of his low laughter her face lighted up wonderfully.
“You gittin’ better!” she exclaimed joyously. “Now I bring you thad rice. Too bad—bud thas all I got! I go ad grade temple at top those hill. Priest too fat run quick to catch at me.” She laughed with an element of her old mischievous defiance.
As he did not speak, too intent upon gazing at and marvelling on the fairness of her face, her expression changed to one of melting anxiety.
“I am lig’ unto those foolish karasu [crow], who mek chatter all thad time. Condescend forgive me, Tojin-san. I nod speag agin mebbe for—for twenty hour—yaes?”
No one had ever kissed her hands before. The sound, the touch aroused her wonder, her apprehension. She drew her hands instinctively from his, and for a moment held them up before her, almost as if she looked at them. Then with an impetuous, laughing little sob she thrust them back upon him:
“Do agin ad my hands, Tojin-san! I lig’ those,” she said.
It was not alone the pallor of bodily illness, but of some mental pain that swept over his face, as he set the little hands back into her lap, reverently, gently.
Later, when strengthened with the simple meal she made for him, she told him how the night before she had come upon him in the Atago Yama woods. It was but two days since the terrible events at the Shiro had driven them both forth into this enchanted wilderness. He had been ill but a night; yet it seemed to him many days.