y without you and nervous," she said, "and I've had a
visitor already."

She pointed to a card lying on a small round table, a flimsy card
printed--not engraved--on cream-coloured pasteboard. Geoffrey picked
it up with a smile.

"Curio dealers?" he asked.

Japanese letters were printed on one side and English on the other.

[Illustration: _S. ITO_ _Attorney of Law_]

"Ito, that's the lawyer fellow, who pays the dividends. Did you see
him."

"Oh, no, I was much too weary. But he has only just gone. You probably
passed him on the stairs."

Geoffrey could only think of the vivid gentleman, who had been talking
with Tanaka. The guide was sent for and questioned, but he knew
nothing. The gentleman in green had merely stopped to ask him the
time.

CHAPTER VIII

THE HALF-CASTE GIRL

_Tomarite mo
Tsubasa wa ugoku
Kocho kana!_

Little butterfly!
Even when it settles
Its wings are moving.

Next morning it was snowing and bitterly cold. Snow in Japan, snow in
April, snow upon the cherry trees, what hospitality was this?

The snow fell all day, muffling the silent city. Silence is at all
times one of Tokyo's characteristics. For so large and important a
metropolis it is strangely silent always. The only continuous street
noise is the grating and crackling of the trams. The lumbering of
horse vehicles and the pulsation of motor traffic are absent; for as
beasts of burden horses are more costly than men, and in 1914 motor
cars were still a novelty. Since the war boom, of course, every
_narikin (nouveau riche)_ has rushed to buy his car; but even so, the
state of the roads, which alternate between boulders and slush, do
not encourage the motorist, and are impassable for heavy lorries. So
incredible weights and bundles are moved on hand-barrows; and bales of
goods and stacks of produce are punted down the dark waterways which
give to parts of Tokyo a Venetian picturesqueness. Passengers, too
proud to walk, flit past noiselessly in rubber-tyred rickshaws--which
are not, as many believe, an ancient and typical Oriental conveyance,
but the modern invention of an English missionary called Robinson.
The hum of the city is dominated by the screech of the tramcars in the
principal streets and by the patter of the wooden clogs, an incessant,
irritating sound like rain. But these were now hushed by the snow.

Neither the snow nor the other of Nature's discouragements can keep
the Japanese for long in