eoffrey's
bed with perspiration, and drove away sleep. It sent him out on long
midnight walks through the silent city in an atmosphere as stifling as
that of a green-house. It beat down upon Tokyo its fetid exhalations,
the smell of cooking, of sewage and of humanity, and the queer sickly
scent of a powerful evergreen tree aflower throughout the city, which
resembled the reek of that Nagasaki brothel, and recalled the dancing
of the _Chonkina_.

It bred swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes from every drop of stagnant
water. They found their way through the musty mosquito-net which
separated his bed from Asako's. They eluded his blow in the evening
light; and he could only wreak his vengeance in the morning, when they
were heavy with his gore.

The colour faded from the Englishman's cheeks. His appetite failed.
He was becoming, what he had never been before, cross and irritable.
Reggie Forsyth wrote to him from Chuzenji,--

"Yae is here, and we go in for yachting in a kind of winged punt,
called a 'lark.' For five pounds you can become a ship-owner. I fancy
myself as a skipper, and I have already won two races. But more often
we escape from the burble of the diplomats, and take our sandwiches
and _thermata_--or is _thermoi_ the plural?--to the untenanted shores
of the lake, and picnic _a deux_. Then, if the wind does not fall
we are lucky; but if it does, I have to row home. Yae laughs at my
oarsmanship; and says that, if you were here, you would do it so much
better. You are a dangerous rival, but for this once I challenge you.
I have a spare pen in my rabbit-hutch. There is just room for you and
Mrs. Barrington. You must be quite melted by now."

But Asako did not want to go to Chuzenji. All her thoughts were
centred on the little house by the river.

"Geoffrey darling," she said, stroking his hair with her tiny waxen
fingers, "it is the hot weather which is making you feel cross. Why
don't you go up to the mountains for a week or so, and stop with
Reggie?"

"Will you come?" asked her husband, brightening.

"I can't very well. You see they are just laying down the _tatami_:
and when that is done the house will be ready. Besides, I feel so well
here. I like the heat."

"But I've never been away without you!" objected Geoffrey, "I think it
would be beastly."

This side of the question had not struck Asako. She was so taken up
with her project. Now, however, she felt a momentary thrill of relief.
She would be ab