“You, Azalea, what have you to say?”
Azalea opened her fan and looked at it thoughtfully, almost as though in the painted pictures upon it she found an answer. Suddenly she raised her head.
“I do not wish to marry,” she said, and added as an afterword: “—yet.”
At that moment her step-mother could have embraced her.
Matsuda cleared his throat.
“When, then, will it suit you?” he asked respectfully.
The girl’s eyes were still upon her fan, and without raising them she replied with a slight shrug of her small, bewitching shoulders:
“I do not know when. Maybe in one year; maybe in ten. I do not wish to marry—yet.”
Matsuda arose.
“For one year,” he said, “or for ten years, or as long as your caprice may make it, I will wait for you.”