“Mr. Hasmer is outside. I thought you were with him. Betty.”
“No... I didn't know your plans... I was waiting here.”
“Well, my dear... it's all right, of course! But I think we'll go now. Mr. Hasmer thinks you ought to see at least one of the temples. Something typical. And of course you will want to visit the cloisonné and satsuma shops, and see the Damascene work. The train leaves for Kobe at four-fifteen. The ships sails at about eight, I believe. We haven't much time, you see.”
A chair scraped. Jonathan Brachey had picked up his hat, his pocket camera and his unread copy of the Japan Times, and was striding toward her, or toward the door. He would pass directly by, of course, without so much as a mental recognition of her existence. For so he had done at Yokohama; so he had done last evening and again this morning on the ship.
But on this occasion, as he bore down on her, the eyes of the distinguished young man rested for an instant on the table, and for a brief moment he wavered in his stride. He certainly saw the sketch. It lay where she had carelessly tossed it, face up, near the edge of the table. And he certainly recognized it for himself; for his strong facial muscles moved a very little. It couldn't have been called a smile; but those muscles distinctly moved. Then, as coolly as before, he strode on out of the room.
Betty's cheeks turned crimson. A further fact doubtless noted by this irritatingly, even arrogantly composed man.
Betty, with desperate dignity, put the sketch in her wrist bag, followed Mrs. Hasmer out of the building, and stepped into the rickshaw that awaited her.
The brown-legged coolie tucked the robe about her, stepped in between the shafts of the vehicle; a second coolie fell into place behind, and they were off down the hill. Just ahead, Mrs. Hasmer's funny little hat bobbed with the inequalities of the road. Just behind, Doctor Hasmer, a calm, patient man who taught philosophy and history in a Christian college fifteen hundred miles or more up the Yangtse River and who never could remember to have his silvery beard trimmed, smiled kindly at her when she turned.
And behind him, indifferent to all the human world, responsive in his frigid way only to the beauties of the Japanese country-side and of the quaint, gray-brown, truly ancient city extending up and down the valley by its narrow, stone-walled stream, rode Mr. Jonathan Brachey.
The coolies, it would seem, had decided to act in concert. From shop to shop among the crowded little streets went the four rickshaws. Any mere human being (so ran Betty's thoughts) would have accepted good-humoredly the comradeship implied in this arrangement on the part of a playful fate; but Mr. Brachey was no mere human being. Side by side stood the four of them in a toy workshop looking down at toy-like artisans with shaved and tufted heads who wore quaint robes and patiently beat out designs in gold and silver wire on expertly fashioned bronze boxes and bowls. They listened as one to the thickly liquid English of a smiling merchant explaining the processes and expanding on the history of fine handiwork in this esthetic land. Yet by no sign did Mr. Brachey's face indicate that he was aware of their presence; except once—on a crooked stairway in a cloisonné shop he flattened himself against the wall to let them pass, muttering, almost fiercely, “I beg your pardon!”