"SHIJIRO ARISUGA."

Then Hoshiko went to the house of Moncure Jones for the second time. The
place of horror to her. That day she dressed once more in her best
kimono,--she had always kept the white one,--and put the new kanzashi
again in her hair, (which you will remember Arisuga bought for her the
day after she had knocked on his shoji,) and painted her face and eyes
to hide their hollowness, and put upon her dainty little body the last
of the "flower perfume"--which every Japanese girl saves from her
marriage for her burial so that she may appear fittingly as a bride
indeed before the gods above. In this matter Jones must be
propitiated--made sure. She did not forget their last parting. So she
went to him arrayed and adorned as she had once meant to go before the
gods.

And she remembered again, and was repeating their last adjuration to
fealty as she stepped upon the sill of Jones's door, those forty-seven
ronins whose wives lent themselves to harlotry that their husbands might
the better achieve their cause. Are they not upon brass to-day, though a
thousand years have passed? Are their wives not properly forgotten?

So when she had come to Jones's house she smiled and was very gay, like
a woman of joy, as she had often read had been the way of the wives of
the forty-seven, and said:--

"You wish me?"

"Wish you!" cried the delighted Jones. "I have never wished for anything
so much in all my life. I have never missed any one so much. It was
beastly of you to go away in that fashion. I haven't married yet."

Hoshiko was very impatient inside, but outside she smiled.

"You wish me?" she repeated.

"Yes! But that beastly husband of yours, with his knives--"

"He--is--dead," said the little woman, forcing each word out of her
heart with agony, laughing shrilly at the end like a creature of
pleasure.

"Ha, ha!" laughed Jones.

"Ha, ha, ha," echoed Hoshiko.

"You're as glad as I am!"

"Yes," smiled Hoshiko.

"Sure he's dead?"

"By your large God!" swore the laughing wife.

"Oh! I understand. And believe you, too! All right, my little Japanese
doll," cried the delighted Jones. "Here's money."

What followed I may not tell: save that Hoshiko made a cold
bargain--Jones calls it his Japanese marriage to this day,--whereby she
got a great deal of money in a short time.

The next day Zanzi got this cable:--

"Keep colors. Starting.

"SHIJIRO ARISUGA."

Presently (it seemed years, but it was on