xaltation still upon him, lifted the
silver thread of a brush and drew his first conscious outline of the
woman soon to be his wife.

[Illustration: "He walked up and down, sometimes in the narrow room,
sometimes in the garden."]

VI

Through all these busy days Ume-ko moved as one but little interested.
Kano and Uchida noticed nothing unusual. To them she was merely the
conventional nonenity of maidenhood that Japanese etiquette demanded.
It never entered their heads that she would not have agreed with equal
readiness to any other husband of their choosing.

Mata knew her idol and nursling better. Hints of character and of
deep-sea passion had risen now and again to the surface of the girl's
placid life. There were currents underneath that the father did not
suspect. Once, during her childhood, a pet bird had been injured in a
fit of anger by old Kano. Ume-ko, with her ashen face under perfect
control, had killed the suffering creature and carried it, wrapped in
white paper, to her own room. The father, ashamed now, and filled with
genuine remorse, had stormed up and down the garden paths, reviling
himself for an impatient ogre, and promising more restraint in future.
Mata, silent for once, had crept to her child-mistress' close-shut
walls, heard the last sobbing words of a Buddhist prayer for the dead,
and burst through the shoji in scant time to catch back the stroke of a
dagger from the girl's slim, upraised throat. Her terrified screams
summoned Kano and the neighbors as well. A priest hurried down from
the temple on the hill. In time the culprit was reduced to a condition
of tearful penitence, and gave her promise never again to attempt so
cowardly and wicked a thing as self-destruction, unless it were for
some noble and impersonal end.

The good old priest, to comfort her, chanted a sutra over the bier of
her lost playmate, and bestowed upon it a high-sounding Buddhist kaimyo
which Kano carved, in his finest manner, upon a wooden grave post. In
time, the artist forgot the episode. Mata never forgot. Often in the
long hours she thought of it now as she watched the girl's face bent
always so silently above the bridal sewing. No impatience or regret
were visible in her. Yet, thought Mata, surely no maiden in her senses
could really wish to become the wife of an ill-mannered, untamed
mountain sprite! Could Death be the secret of this pale tranquillity?
Was Ume-ko to cheat them all, at the l