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Updated: June 27, 2025
"Hang your old hat! What is a hat to a man, and he the only friend I have out here. I don't care if there was another girl! She can have him. He was somebody to play with. It was something to do, a touch of home. Oh! it's cruel! cruel!" Though another ideal was gone to smash, I was almost ready to cry myself with relief that it was only a playmate Zura wanted in Pinkey and not a sweetheart.
Zura was quiet and, finding she avoided every allusion to home, I drifted into telling her a bit of the garden's history its unknown age, the real princes and princesses who in the long ago had trodden its crooked paths. Legend said that so great was their love for it their spirits refused to abide in Nirvana and came to dwell in the depths of the dim old garden.
I took Zura by the hand, pulled Jane's sleeve, motioned Kobu toward the door, and together we went softly away. An hour later, when Mr. Hamilton came in, the happiest spot in all the Flowery Kingdom was the little living-room of "The House of the Misty Star." The explanation was all so simple I felt as if I should be sentenced for not thinking of it before.
Before I could explain that the child was a waif temporarily housed with me, shy and easily frightened, Zura whipped from somewhere out of the mysteries of a tight dress a pad and pencil and, with something like magic, the lines of the little maid's figure and face were transferred to the white sheet. "How Daddy would have loved her," said Zura, softly, as she covered her work. I was silent.
At dinner Jane was the only one of the three of us without an impediment in her silence. I was glad when the meal was over and we went to the study. Zura buried herself in a deep windowseat, to watch the lights on the water, she said.
If I don't, there'll be an uprising of my ancestors. Good-by." She went as suddenly as she had come. It was as though a wild sea-bird had swept through the room, leaving us startled, but refreshed. "Zura Wingate is the realest girl I know, Mr. Hanaford."
To me she stood for all I had lost of girlhood rights and I wanted her for my friend. Her laughter went through me like a draft of wine. The echo swept a long silent chord, and the tune it played was the jig-time of youth. When Zura caught her breath and explained the meaning of her words, it disclosed to me a phase of life of which I had never dreamed.
Whether intentional or not, Jane's twisted words sent a little breeze of laughter before the coming storm. For the rest of the afternoon Zura had little to say. I made no further explanation of Mr. Chalmers or his call, thinking it best to await the arrival of his note. It came just before night. The reading of it left Zura white.
Some weeks before she had returned to Hijiyama practically penniless, which was bad, and a widow, which made it very difficult to marry her off again; but worse still was the half-breed child she had brought with her, a daughter of about seventeen. This girl, whose name was Zura, I soon found was the sore spot in Kishimoto San's grievance, the center around which his storm of trouble brewed.
By training, environment and inclination Zura Wingate might be of the West; but her Occidental blood was diluted with that of the East, and wherever is found even one small drop, though it sleep long, in the end it arises and claims its own as surely as death claims life. It was only a little while since Kobu had left us to go to the station to bring the unwelcome visitor from America.
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