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Some day, perhaps the very day before the wedding, she might reveal it. For the present, as she said, no one but herself and Uchida knew. More than once during sewing hours, Umè-ko herself had wondered how her father was able to give her silks of such beauty and variety. With the unthrift of the true artist, Kano was always poor.
The old man would have been as surprised and far angrier than his daughter, had he known that Tatsu's pictures, stolen craftily by the confederates, Uchida and Mata, and sold in Yokohama for about a tenth of their true value, were the source of this sudden affluence. Tatsu remained ignorant, also. But, provided they took no image of Umè's face, he would not have cared at all.
"Since the gods allow it, I should not complain," she admitted. "Indeed, Mr. Uchida and I are doing well by the young couple in the matter of silks and house furnishings. And whisper this not no one but he and I dream from what source these splendid fabrics come!" Mata had thrust a poisoned arrow of curiosity into her listener, and knew it.
Through all these busy days Umè-ko moved as one but little interested. Kano and Uchida noticed nothing unusual. To them she was merely the conventional nonenity of maidenhood that Japanese etiquette demanded. It never entered their heads that she would not have agreed with equal readiness to any other husband of their choosing. Mata knew her idol and nursling better.
Kano's irritation vanished. "Ando Uchida!" he cried aloud, springing to his feet, and hurrying to the edge of the veranda. "Ando Uchida, is it indeed you? How stout and strong and prosperous you seem! Welcome!" "A little too stout for warm weather," laughed Ando, as laboriously he removed his foreign shoes and accepted his host's assistance up the one stone step to the veranda.
Out by the hill, a butterfly, snow white, rested a moment on the young girl's hair. She was again looking at the cliff, and did not notice it. Ando Uchida, from his green seclusion among the bamboo groves of Meguro, sent, from time to time, a scout into the city. First an ordinary hotel kotsukai or man-servant was employed. This experiment proved costly as well as futile.
This year very few guests attended the Garden Party but among those who did come were several strangers. About half a dozen ladies from the Japanese Legation came with Madame Uchida, wife of the Japanese Minister. Her Majesty was always very pleased to see this lady whom she very much admired on account of her extreme politeness.
According to an Associated Press Dispatch from Tokio, January 31, 1922, Baron Uchida, the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, replying to interpolations in the House of Peers, said: "The Four-Power Treaty was not intended to abrogate the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, but rather to widen and extend it."
The purple dusk brimmed his tiny garden, and yet he could not stop. Art had seized him by the throat, and shook him, as a prey. Uchida, peering at him from between the fusuma, perceived the glory and turned away in silence; nor for that day nor the next would he allow any one to approach the frenzied boy.
He strove now to speak simply, directly, and with convincing earnestness. Kano had settled into his old attitude of dejection. "One morning, not more than six weeks ago," began Uchida, "the engineering party which I command had climbed some splintered peaks of the Kiu Shiu range to a spot quite close, indeed, to that thin waterfall which you remember "
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