It is nearly a month since our night of pleasure at the temple fête of the thousands of lanterns, and I have been in terrible trouble.

Something has happened to Mousmé, and till that catastrophe—to me it seemed nothing less—I never realized what she was to me.

It was so sudden.

I had left her in the morning, bright as the sunshine which forced its way through the bamboo and paper shoji, and, filtering thus, fell in golden, thread-like rays like spun silk upon the floor. The last I saw of her was a tiny figure upon the balcony as I turned the corner of the road, blowing kisses to me with one hand, and waving a huge bunch of crimson lotus in the other,[164] flowers we had just gathered together in the sun-bathed garden.

And in three or four hours all this was altered, obliterated.

I climbed up from the town leisurely, taking the shady side of the road, and availing myself to the full of every shadow cast by the trees or by the queer old villas with their mossy roofs and eccentric architecture. If I had but known, how my steps would have hastened!

Arrived at the wicket, I cannot see even a flutter of Mousmé’s dress to-day. She is usually awaiting my return in the shady corner of the verandah with her samisen, or with a pile of books at her side, from which she has been trying to spell out the words in big print.

I walk up the path, which is flower-bordered, and alive with bees whose humming sounds are like the deeper notes of an ?olian harp, and across the garden[165] where dragon-flies flit, iridescent shuttles weaving their colours, blue, green and yellow, into the sunlit air, darting between the little ponds in which gold-fish hide from the sunlight beneath the tranquil floating lotus-leaves.

I enter the house. Everything is strangely still.

There is no one in the room in which we usually sit. The blue-and-white vases of Arita porcelain are filled with lotus-blooms, dainty, fantastic in their arrangement, with spiked grasses and sedges. A tiny vase of bronze stands upon my writing-table. As usual, dear little Mousmé has placed in it the finest blossoms, and in their rose-hued cups I fancy some of her kisses may lurk. Her shoes are standing in a patch of sunlight on the floor. “She cannot have gone out, then,” I say to myself. “It is evident that she is not down at mother-in-law’s.”

[166]

Where is she?

I push back one of the panels to enter the next room. Perhaps she is there.

The room is so dark that I can scarcely see across it; but in the dimness I can just discern a something stretched upon the floor.

I step hastily forward.

Yes, it is Mousmé lying there, with her face, upturned, looking a white, featureless oval in the gloom, her gown elongating her slender figure, and her huge sleeves of blue flowered silk with orange linings spread out like the maimed wings of a brilliant, long-bodied moth.

I stoop down.

Is she asleep? No, but she is terribly still. Is it a coquettish ruse on her part, and will she open her eyes in a minute or two, and burst out laughing in my face, and then pull it down for a shower of kisses from her rosebud mouth?

[167]

Half expecting this, I wait an instant, and feel as if I were kneeling beside my own grave. But the fantastic little figure I love so well gives no sign of movement. My alarm increases. I get up, hastily push back one of the sliding paper panels, and let in a flood of sunlight from the garden.

It streams full on Mousmé’s face; it searches out the gold threads in the embroidery of her gown; it tells me in an instant that there is something seriously wrong.

There are no bells in this strange little house of mine, so I beat upon the floor with my heel to summon Oka or his wife.

I wait anxiously, kneeling beside silent little Mousmé. Each second seems to extend itself into an hour. How long it seems—that minute or two ere I can hear some one ascending the rickety stairs from the basement. It is Oka’s wife who enters,[168] her eyes still but half unfastened from an interrupted siesta.

She comes forward to where I am kneeling beside Mousmé.

Unlike women of her class in England, Oka’s wife is laconic.

“Fever,” she says, on catching sight of Mousmé’s face. “Send for the doctor very quick!” She is evidently waiting for me to give my assent to her suggestion, so I nod my head, and she goes away softly across the room.

A few minutes later I hear one of her numerous progeny go away down the path at a run, and I know the doctor has been sent for.

Mousmé remains unconscious all the time that we are getting her partially undressed and on to the mattress.

Am I to lose her?

The bare thought drives the blood away from my heart. I know what Kotmasu[169] would say, for he still disbelieves, or at least pretends to disbelieve, in my marriage.

“There are velly plenty more mousmés.”

“Yes, very well,” something inside my mind replies, “but only one Mousmé.”

Whilst we wait the coming of Han Sen, the doctor, I am driven almost frantic by the noises which one can never shut out of a Japanese house. The droning hum of the bees at work on the roses outside, the unceasing chirruping whirr of the cicalas, all the sounds of a garden in............