She stood a long time gazing down at the spreading sea, quite unconscious that another had climbed the steep path, one who now found even a more entrancing picture before his eyes than the wonderful view below them. It was Soichi, come to visit the old shrine. All unprepared for the vision that came so suddenly before him as he turned to look down on the well-remembered shore, it was hard to stifle his admiration and surprise.
Leaning a little against a gnarled old pine, she stood motionless, her strong profile and the exquisite curve of her chin revealed unwittingly to him as he paused, half concealed by a clump of trees. Back over the years since he had seen her, the rush of memory took him to that day when she had told him that she knew his secret. He saw her again standing in the road and bidding him, with a smile, come on with her. And now that little girl was this beautiful woman! She had not changed, and yet she was all changed.
Slowly the tide of emotion swelled within him. He could not remember that he had ever thought she was a pretty girl, and in the years he had spent at the university he had scarcely thought of her at all. He had seen many pretty girls there, but never had one affected him like this. Now he saw at a glance that she was wonderfully beautiful, and the more he looked the more wonderful she became. It dawned on him that she was much the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and immediately he had an almost irresistible longing to go to her at once and tell her so.
An unhappy thought of himself restrained him. They were no longer schoolfellows. She was the daughter of a Samurai and he—Poor Soichi! Not even his university life had taken from his own consciousness all taint of the old disgrace. He did not know, because he had had no experience, that love is heimin as well as shizoku, a Commoner as often as a Gentleman, and that there is never advantage in loving a girl unless you tell her so.
He moved a little, and a snapping twig told her that some one was near. She turned quickly and their eyes met. A long moment they stood so and neither spoke, yet in that moment the whole world changed for each of them. Under his steady gaze she felt the blush come tingling up her throat and spread across her cheeks. Like one grown fast to the ground on which he rested, he stood and only stared. His brain refused to act, his tongue to work. Then she moved, and the spell was broken.
“O-Mitsu-san!” he cried, and tone and glance told all he would have uttered.
With all her face rosy with warm blood she gazed fearlessly back into his eyes, and murmured softly a single word, yet one instinct with the feeling of a thousand.
“Thou,” she said, in the old familiar language of their childhood.
Even as eyes and look had spoken for him when voice and tongue were mute, so had she answered. His ugly doubts of himself fled at first sight of her smile and it was the old Soichi who sprang forward to her side. A thousand questions trembled on his lips and struggled in vain for utterance. His unruly tongue refused its function, and he stopped in confusion, even his bold eyes falling before her smiling glance. It was the girl, older than he in such matters by hundreds of years of heritage, who said lightly after a little pause:
“I did not know that you had come home.”