I hear the patter of feet coming up the verandah steps. It is Mousmé returning. Ah! Mousmé, you and I will conquer London together! You with your dainty grace and _piquante_ face, I with my wealth, as you esteem it, and family name.
Her hands are so full of flowers that she has to push aside the panel with one knee ere she can enter.
She comes across to my table and places the blossoms in the empty bowl of bronze.
By a stroke of genius in coquetry the flowers are hyacinths!
When she has finished their arrangement, she says smilingly, her lips parted, and twin rows of white pearls showing between them:
“They are me. You never forget me when you see them!”
I have only seen Kotmasu once since our marriage, now five days ago; and then it was quite by accident, down near the quay, where I had gone to discover whether my quarterly parcel of magazines and books had arrived, which Lou with commendable regularity despatches “to that brother of mine who is out in Japan, living at one of those towns with a heathenish and unpronounceable name.”
Kotmasu seemed somewhat surprised to see me.
“Where is Madame?” he asks with a smile, as though—as no doubt he did—he half suspected she had returned to her mother already.
I must have shown that I read the undercurrent of suggestion somewhat plainly. “At home,” I answered. “You wouldn’t surely expect me to bring her out at this part of the day, in all this heat, and down here, too!”
“No! no! Of course not,” he hastened to reply.
I was somewhat mollified by his evident anxiety to put matters straight again between us. He can scarcely, I thought, be expected to have the same faith in my experiment as I have. To him my marriage, until it has existed for some time, can, I realize, only appear in the light of a temporary arrangement.
“Why do you not come up as you used?” I inquire in a friendly tone.
“It is your—what you call it?—something to do with the bees and the moon. I did not care to intrude,” he replies deprecatingly.
“How ridiculous! We shall be always glad to see you, my good fellow,” I reply, laughing as naturally as I can.
Even his attire this morning is that odd mixture of Anglo-Japanese garments he so much affects, consisting of a straw hat and tennis flannels, worn in conjunction with the flowered dressing-gown-like garment of a well-to-do merchant.