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A pink light glowed upon his paper shoji; the plum tree, now entirely leafless, threw a splendid shadow-silhouette. At the eaves, sparrows chattered merrily. It was to be a fair day: yet instantly, even before he had sprung, cruelly awake, to his knees, he knew that the dreaded Something was upon him.
"About twelve minutes past nine," said he, pulling out a watch with a nickel case, "and, say put out the light. It would be funny to have two silhouettes of bonze heads on the shoji. The fox is too ready to suspect." I blew out the lamp which stood upon the lacquer-enameled table. The shoji alone was dimly plain by the star light. The moon has not come up yet.
Tatsu had, as rudely, reopened the shoji panels, tearing a large hole in the translucent paper. "He had come merely for a glimpse of the Dragon Maid," he told the angry dame. "In a few days more she was to be his wife, and this maddening convention of keeping him always from her was eating out his vitals with red fire," so declared Tatsu, and let the consuming passion blaze in his sunken eyes.
And if the Old Woman is not paid the sum of three rin, she takes away the clothes of the dead, and hangs them upon the trees. The temple is small, neat, luminous with the sun pouring into its widely opened shoji; and Akira must know the priests well, so affable their greeting is. I make a little offering, and Akira explains the purpose of our visit.
Half the houses about it were dark as tombs; the other half showed only glimmering shoji taunting me by the sounds they suffered to escape, or by a chance silhouette thrown for a moment upon the paper wall by some one within. And now and then, as if still further to enhance the solitude, a pair passed me by in low self-suited talk. Still no sign of the boy.
Within a hotel or even a common dwelling-house, nobody knocks before entering your room: there is nothing to knock at except a shoji or fusuma, which cannot be knocked upon without being broken. And in this world of paper walls and sunshine, nobody is afraid or ashamed of fellow-men or fellow-women. Whatever is done, is done, after a fashion, in public.
Gaily she set her wits and fingers to work placing a heavy brass hibachi over a black scorch in the matting, fitting new rice-paper into the small wooden squares of the shoji, and hanging kakemono over the ugly holes made by the missing plaster in the wall.
Umè-ko in her room forgot her sewing, and leaned a delicate ear closer to the shoji. Old Mata's wall of reserve went down with a crash. "He believes as you believe!" she cried out shrilly. "All your Shingon chants and invocations and miracles he has faith in. Is that not what you call enlightenment? He and Miss Umè worship together almost daily at the great temple above us on the hill.
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