"Answer me, Yuki, who was that man?"
She did not answer. Suddenly she sagged to his feet, wrapping her long gray sleeves about his ankles. "Oh, Master, do not kill him! He is a very sick person, yes! I will get the paper for you, Lord. I will get it for you, I will get it!" she chattered in English. Why, at this central crisis of her life, she should have spoken English to a Japanese was something that she never understood.
Haganè looked down upon her silently. He could not move for the coils around his feet. He saw clearly that she had reasons for detaining him, and his mind went naturally to the one solution. "This was a lover she protected." Yet he was calm, his grave dignity unassailable. His lips, his chin, his down-bent lids were of metal; only at the temples, veins sprang and stood like branches of dull red coral.
"I shall not ask again, Yuki; will you tell me the name of the man who has gone?"
Yuki stared up at him through flickering lids. The air snapped into little particles of jet and tinsel. Things were getting the queer look. She feared that she was going to laugh. "Was there a man, Lord?" she questioned.
"Gods!" said Haganè. His nostrils blew in and out, and still his voice was even and kind, "Yuki-ko, your country, the life of our Emperor, may be menaced by this theft. Can any bodily passion exonerate this ultimate crime?"
A great spasm seized the crouching woman. "Lord, have mercy on my weak heart; but I can get the paper—I alone can get it; I will buy it for you with my life!"
"Bah—your life! We do not offer carrion to the Gods. Unloose my feet,—poor soiled thing. Do not touch me!"
Yuki hid her face against his feet. Her arms coiled like steel bands.
Slowly and deliberately he knelt and untwined, as he might the tendrils of a vine he did not wish to bruise, her clinging arms, the long gray sleeves. There was no roughness in any movement except at the instant when he snapped the obi-domè, intending to use it to bind her wrists. She felt his intention, and waited craftily until he had almost drawn the first noose, then slipping her arms away, encircled again his patient feet, babbling, "Let me get it. He was ill; he did not know. Harm him not. I will get the paper." In her distracted thought some other self, anterior to this, seemed to be at a great distance, running side by side with Pierre, and jerking out to him through failing breath: "I hold Haganè back, but it cannot last very long. Do not harm him,—I will do what you wish, Pierre, I will be what you wish; already Haganè casts me off, but do not harm him. Quick, quick, poor mad boy, my strength fails! Haganè is coming—coming—"