Suddenly, in the solemn hush of that dim, lamp-lighted room, I heard a chuckle of cynical amusement. The priestess of Lal heard it, too, and faced me with beautiful, blazing eyes, and flaming cheeks still damp with tears.
"Did you dare to laugh at me!" she cried. "I could kill you. Did you _dare_?"
"No," I said. "I believe, as you do, that love--"
Again that rustle of malicious laughter crept across the incense-laden air. In the eyes of the woman a sudden terror showed, and she shrank close to me.
"Who is it laughs?" she whispered. "This is not the first time I've heard it, when I spoke and thought of love. It--frightens me. But," she cried with sudden energy, "I _will_ believe that love is everything. If it is not, what becomes of us poor women? Are our lives all wasted on a dream?"
"I do not know what it is that laughs," I said. "Some evil influence seems to dog my path, that turns all the smiling face of the earth to dust and ashes. But do not doubt, and I will not. True love is the one eternal thing in our mortal lives. It is greater than we are ourselves, and it is never wasted--"
Suddenly the flames, in their silver sockets, sucked upward once and then were gone, and we were left in inky darkness, the priestess of Lal and I, cowering close together like two frightened children, while ghostly garments rustled all about us, and ghostly voices whispered, and we saw what Okimi learned.
The girl Okimi is the daughter of parents who are poor and so honest that they sold their daughter for money to pay their debts, just as soon as it was possible. The girl went down to the ship and away across the radiant Inland Sea without shame, and without a murmur at her fate, for such things happen so often that the gods have no time to listen to complaints.
That is how she came to be living in a strange land, in a gilded house in a garden where big paper lanterns glow in the shrubbery every night. Okimi soon discovered the garden, and learned to be fairly happy there in her placid, childish way, tickling the gold-fish in the fountain basin with long blades of grass, and laughing to see them dart away, playing with the monkeys, and crooning little flower-songs to the big, unfriendly ylang-ylang.