Kotmasu can on occasion be fairly concise, if not epigrammatic.
“Mousmé in Bond Street!” he ejaculated; and if he had been English, I knew instinctively that he would have whistled.
“Why Bond Street?” I asked somewhat feebly, with just a shade of chilliness at my heart from the incongruity conjured up by his words.
“Because,” he replied slowly, “that would be a good test.”
I might have attempted a reply, but there is a sudden glow of light on the verandah, a yellow-red, diffused light, which fails to pierce the gloom at the far end, and Mousmé and Oka appear with the lanterns.
Mousmé gives me a kiss, to the peril of her lantern with its monster of a crayfish painted in vermilion on its yellow side; at which Kotmasu smiles indulgently; then we start off.
We go away down our garden—which has such narrow paths, some of them scarcely less pigmy than those associated in my memory with the garden of childhood’s days—now so dark and full of mysterious shadows, heavy with the strong scent of flowers, alive with the incessant noise of the cicalas, and movements of huge, soft-winged night-moths, which circle round the light of our lanterns, beating their wings with a soft, quick rattle against their distended sides, and every now and again flying into our faces and making Mousmé give a little scream of simulated terror, at which Kotmasu and I laugh.
I shut the gate after us, and then taking Mousmé’s arm, we make our way down the rapidly sloping road. There is another party ahead of us, also with lanterns; and so steep is the path, that in the black darkness we almost seem as though we should step off into the abyss, right down on to the swaying lights below us.
Such strange shadows are set dancing on the road by the swaying lanterns we carry, that Mousmé, who must, after all, have seen such things dozens of times before, clings closer to me for protection, and in a low, frightened undertone she says:
“Cy-reel! Cy-reel! I am frightened! I shall shut my eyes and take hold of you!”
But when I look down at her a few paces further on, I see that it is but her delightful coquetry; for her dark-brown eyes, which in the lantern light have shadows like a lake, are open, and are watching Kotmasu, who is a little in advance of us two.