"You know," said Dodge, slowly, "this may mean to me giving up every hope of happiness. And it's such a nasty little cause,—like having one's eye put out by a spitball."
"Yet you prefer it to retracting one rude, silly thought!"
"For God's sake!" cried the badgered youth, "how can a man retract what he still thinks? Do you want me to lie, and say I don't think a thing when I do think it."
"Yes," said Gwendolen, with a strange glint in her face. "Lie! Say that you do not think it. I shall be satisfied with that."
"I'll be damned if I do!" said Dodge. "I'll lie to please myself, but I won't lie at the bidding of another,—not even you! Shall I stop the carriage and get out?"
Gwendolen, with a little choking sound in her throat, turned away. Her gesture seemed an assent. Miserably the young man realized that he was bound by Mr. Todd to remain with her, and overhear the conversation that might ensue. In a moment more he helped her from the carriage in silence, allowing her to precede him to the Onda gate, and up the garden stones to the door.
Old Suzumè answered the knock. She parted the entrance shoji very craftily, one bent eye to the crack. Her left cheek could not have been two inches from the floor. This gave an uncanny look, as if a severed head, or one of those long gourd-necked ghosts of Japanese mountains, had appeared to receive them.
Gwendolen said, "Oh!" and retreated. Dodge stepped forward boldly, and put one gloved hand into the crack. The old dame shivered at this, and seemed to cower for a spring. A swift, soft rush of feet came through the house, and Yuki, flinging both doors wide, sent a crooked smile toward them.
"Come quickly," she panted; "I pray you wait not to remove the shoes. My father is absent. I have prayed for Gwendolen; there is great thing to be said."
Dodge shut his teeth together. He was to be needed. Without a look for him, Gwendolen, obeying Yuki's injunction as to shoes, sprang up the one stone doorstep and followed Yuki along a dim corridor. Dodge, more deliberately, motioned Suzumè to remove his shoes, standing first on one foot, then on the other, and balancing himself by the aid of a shoji frame. The untying of shoestrings was a difficult task for excited old fingers. Her beady eyes darted incessantly back into the house.