She raised her face, white and startled in expression now. Her hands crept out from the sleeves.
“Ah,” she said, “of whom do you speak, good Okido?”
He did not answer her query, and her breath came excitedly.
“You speak of my husband? You have heard from him?”
“Not your husband, Madame Azalea,” he said, “but one who would become so.”
She passed her hand bewilderedly over her brow.
“I do not understand,” she said.
Her strength had been already too much taxed. She turned from the Nakoda and opened the shoji behind her. Then noiselessly she slipped into her chamber, feeling her way through the room with her hands outstretched like one gone blind. When she found the couch she tottered, rather than lay, face down upon it in that instinctive fashion of the Japanese woman to protect the child upon her back. Soon she slept the sleep of the exhausted.
Some one sent fresh flowers in the early mornings to the house of Azalea. They were sweet always with the sparkling dews upon them and they filled the house with fragrance. Azalea delighted in them. They were symbolic of the truth that there was sweetness in life in spite of its melancholy. And so, in those days, she would sit before the flowers, her little head bent above her sewing, and would attempt to fashion the garments of her baby in imitation of the flowers themselves.
The baby grew in strength and beauty, a solemn-faced, large-eyed morsel of humanity, with skin like a peach bloom in color, soft and fat and delightful to the touch of the caressing mother.