She looked at him timidly with a new expression in her face. It was as if a flame had crept into her eyes and set its touch upon her lips. She had crossed her hands upon her bosom.
“I, too, am Ni-no ama, like unto my mother,” she softly said. “For both our sin I got mek thad atonement unto Buddha!”
He regarded her in a spell-bound silence. There was something about her words, her actions, withal their simplicity, that held a sacredness. She, against whom the hostile hands of an entire Buddhist community had been raised, a priestess of the Buddha! It was impossible, preposterous! She had been but a child when her parents were killed. What could they have taught her thus early?
She seemed to realize from his silence his doubts, and suddenly she stepped back, raising her hands high above her head, bringing the tips of the fingers together. A moment she stood with her face upraised, her eyes closed.
“For you, oh Tojin-san, I will danze! It is as my mother have tich me the danze for the gods. Haiken suru!” (Adoringly look).
From side to side she swayed, her small, exquisite hands moving in the languorous motions of the dance. Never in even the greatest temples of Kioto or Nikko had he seen a priestess perform as she was doing. He thought of the glittering robes of the hundred nuns chanting their splendid ritual before some gorgeous altar, of their impassive, stony faces, their ebony hair, their narrow, inscrutable eyes. But she, with her unbound hair of gold, her bosom and face of snow!
Yes, they were right, they of Fukui! She was an incarnation of the Sun Goddess, tripping like the Spring upon the earth, and inspiring in the hearts and eyes of all who saw her sensations of adoration, and of those who dared not look, of fear—fear and hatred!
She had stolen the face and vestments of the goddess, so they had said; but her soul was that of a fox!
There burst upon him suddenly a realization of the impassable gulf between them, and with the knowledge came an overwhelming sense of revolution, the mad, irresistible passion of the primitive man who knows only his desires.
But a moment later she was at his feet, her pure, trusting face smiling appealingly up at him.