acred hour of study, even
when the master's back was turned.

* * * * *

"_O hay[=o] gozaimas_'!"

"For honourable feast of yesterday evening indeed very much obliged!"

The oily forehead of Mr. Ito touched the matting floor with the
exaggerated humility of conventional gratitude. The lawyer wore
a plain kimono of slate-grey silk. His American manners and his
pomposity had both been laid aside with the tweed suit and the
swallow-tail. He was now a plain Japanese business man, servile
and adulatory in his patron's presence. Mr. Fujinami Gentaro bowed
slightly in acknowledgment across the remnants of his meal.

"It is no matter," he said, with a few waves of his fan; "please sit
at your ease."

The two gentlemen arranged themselves squatting cross-legged for the
morning's confidential talk.

"The cherry-flowers," Ito began, with a sweep of the arm towards the
garden grove, "how quickly they fall, alas!"

"Indeed, human life also," agreed Mr. Fujinami. "But the guests of
last evening, what is one to think?"

"_Ma_! In truth, _sensei_ (master or teacher), it would be impossible
not to call that Asa San a beauty."

"Ito Kun," said his relative in a tone of mild censure, "it is foolish
always to think of women's looks. This foreigner, what of him?"

"For a foreigner, that person seems to be honourable and grave,"
answered the retainer, "but one fears that it is a misfortune for the
house of Fujinami."

"To have a son who is no son," said the head of the family, sighing.

"_D[=o]m[=o]!_ It is terrible!" was the reply; "besides, as the _sensei_
so eloquently said last night, there are so few blossoms on the old
tree."

The better to aid his thoughts, Mr. Fujinami drew from about his
person a case which contained a thin bamboo pipe, called _kiseru_ in
Japanese, having a metal bowl of the size and shape of the socket of
an acorn. He filled this diminutive bowl with a little wad of tobacco,
which looked like coarse brown hair. He kindled it from the charcoal
ember in the _hibachi_. He took three sucks of smoke, breathing them
slowly out of his mouth again in thick grey whorls. Then with three
hard raps against the wooden edge of the firebox, he knocked out again
the glowing ball of weed. When this ritual was over, he replaced the
pipe in its sheath of old brocade.

The lawyer sucked in his breath, and bowed his head.

"In family matters," he said, "it is rude for an outside perso