“Tama!”
“You speag right,” she said, and could not smile with her white lips so tremulous, “thas only—beautiful dream. Thad mist gone—away!”
“Dream! No, it’s a beautiful reality. We are here, together, and nothing in the world shall ever tear us apart again.”
“Nothing in the worl’,” she repeated.
Suddenly she covered her eyes, as if the light pained them. From behind her little sheltering hands came her voice, still with that note of pleading terror:
“They come—tear you ’way from me now, Tojin-san! All the way—how many miles I kinnod say—I see them! In my heart I know! Ad my ears I hear! Those feet—ah, cannot you hear them also, kind Tojin-san? Listen!”
She put up her hands, and they stood in a silence, straining for the sound that only she could hear, or believed she did.
He knew she was right. Her instinctive sense was keener than mere sight. Simply, with a tender strength that could not be resisted, he took her little hand in his.
“Come, Tama. We must reach Sho Kon Sha to-night.”
“Yaes,” she murmured, and now there was a note of plaintive weariness in her voice. “I thought she said the gods were good, an’ that perhaps they goin’ forgit us here in those mountains.”