“That is true,” said Keiki, “but when the summer passes then the flowers must still die, and we may no longer hear the singing of the birds. Then still the river will be silent and motionless—perhaps dead.”
Keiki sighed with the moodiness of love attained. A gentle depression stole from him to the Lady Wistaria.
“Alas! my lord,” she murmured; “it is so with all things in life that are beautiful. They vanish and die like the flowers of summer.”
“Then,” said Keiki, “swear by the god of the sea, by whose waters we now stand, that our love shall never die, and that for the time of this life, and the next, and as many after as may come, you will be my flower wife, and take me for your husband.”
“By all the eight million gods of heaven, and by the god of the sea, I swear,” said Wistaria.
VI
HE air was balmy, the sky of a cerulean blue, the Dewdrop gardens were sweet with a strange charm and mystery all their own. Pebbles, sand, and stone, were cunningly displayed and mingled to create the illusion of an approach to a giant sea. In themselves the wondrous rocks were so fashioned as to form a landscape wherein neither foliage, trees, nor flowers were necessary. Small, grotesque bridges, made of rare rocks in their natural form, undefaced by hammer or chisel, spanned the miniature rivers, which, snakelike, crept and threaded their way in and out of the rock island. Suddenly appearing caverns yawned wide agape, only to show on closer approach that they were naught but gigantic rocks, hollow within.