his grip
tightened on the frail _shoji_, and with a nervous spasm he sent it
clattering out of its socket flat upon the floor of the room, like
a screen blown down by the wind. Ito dashed forward to help Geoffrey
replace the damage. When they turned round again, the two women had
disappeared.

"Captain Barrington," said Ito, "I think you had better go away. You
make bad thing worse."

Geoffrey frowned at the little creature. He would have liked to have
crushed him underfoot like a cockroach. But as that was impossible,
nothing remained for him to do but to depart, leaving the track of his
dirty boots on the shining corridor. His last glimpse of his cousins'
home was of two little serving-maids scuttering up with dusters to
remove the defilement.

Asako had fainted.

* * * * *

As Reggie had said in Chuzenji, "What actually happens does not
matter: it is the thought of what might have happened, which sticks."
If Reggie's tolerant and experienced mind could not rid itself of the
picture conjured up by the possibility of his friend's treachery and
his mistress's lightness, how could Asako, ignorant and untried, hope
to escape from a far more insistent obsession? She believed that her
husband was guilty. But the mere feeling that it was possible that he
might be guilty would have been enough to numb her love for him, at
any rate for a time. She had never known heartache before. She did not
realise that it is a fever which runs its appointed course of torment
and despair, which at length after a given term abates, and then
disappears altogether, leaving the sufferer weak but whole again.
The second attack of the malady finds its victim familiar with the
symptoms, resigned to a short period of misery and confident of
recovery. A broken heart like a broken horse is of great service to
its owner.

But Asako was like one stricken with an unknown disease. Its violence
appalled her, and in her uncertainty she prayed for death. Moreover,
she was surrounded by counsellors who traded on her little faith, who
kept on reminding her that she was a Japanese, that she was among her
father's people who loved her and understood her, that foreigners
were notoriously treacherous to women, that they were blue-eyed and
cruel-hearted, that they thought only of money and material things.
Let her stay in Japan, let her make her home there. There she would
always be a personage, a member of the family. Among