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Then she remembered how entirely Japanese she had become in appearance. Mr. Ito called during the afternoon to wish a Merry Christmas. Asako regaled him with thin green tea and little square cakes of ground rice, filled with a kind of bean paste called "an." She kept Tanaka in the room all the time; for Sadako's remarks about marriage with Ito had alarmed her.
Only in the evenings a sense of insecurity rose with the river mists, and a memory of Sadako's warning shivered through the lonely room with the bitter cold of the winter air. It was then that Asako felt for the little dagger resting hidden in her bosom just as Sadako had shown her how to wear it.
One little opening was left in the wooden armature for the girls to enter by. "Please come again many, many times," was cousin Sadako's last farewell. "The house of the Fujinami is your home. Sayonara!" Geoffrey was waiting for his wife in the hall of the hotel. He was anxious at her late return.
From a downstair room there came the twang of cousin Sadako's koto, a kind of zither instrument, upon which she played interminable melancholy sonatas of liquid, detached notes, like desultory thoughts against a background of silence.
The maid came in to close the shutters for the night. Where was Tanaka? He had gone out to a New Year party with relatives. Asako felt her loneliness all of a sudden; and she was grateful for the moral comfort of cousin Sadako's sword. She drew it from its sheath and examined the blade, and the fine work on the hilt, with care and alarm, like a man fingering a serpent.
"Did she love him," her daughter wondered, "as I love Geoffrey?" Through Sadako's interpretation Mrs. Her father had been a samurai in the old two-sworded days. The photograph was not very like her. It was too serious. "Like you," said the elder woman, "she was always laughing and happy. She was chosen for your father because he was so sad and wrathful.
He tottered and fell backward. Ito was on the top of him. Asako closed her eyes. She heard a hoarse roar like a lion. When she dared to look again, she saw Tanaka kneeling over Ito's body. With a wrench he pulled Sadako's dagger out of the prostrate mass. It was followed by a jet of blood, and then by a steady trickle from body, mouth and nostrils, which spread over the matting.
He was on his way to rescue the lady who was immured in the top of the red pagoda on the opposite hill. Asako's legs were getting numb. She had been sitting on them in correct Japanese fashion all this time. She was proud of the accomplishment, which she considered must be hereditary, but she could not keep it up for much longer than half an hour. Sadako's mother entered. "Asa San is welcome."
A room was prepared for her in a distant wing of the straggling house, a "foreign-style" room in an upper story with glass in the windows stained glass too with white muslin blinds, a colored lithograph of Napoleon and a real bed, recently purchased on Sadako's pleading that everything must be done to make life happy for their guest. "But she is a Japanese," Mr. Fujinami Gentaro had objected.
Of course, he might adopt the children whom he already possessed by his first wife, but the elder boy showed signs of being mentally deficient, the younger was certainly deaf and dumb, and the two others were girls and did not count. "But if this Asa is barren?" said Mrs. Fujinami Shidzuyé, who naturally desired that her daughter Sadako's husband should be the heir of the Fujinami.
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