garden,
pelting the terrified gold-fish in their caves, stripping leaves and
tips from Kano's favorite pine-shrubs, or standing, long intervals of
time, on the crest of the moon-viewing hillock, from which he could
command vistas of the street below.

"There 's your jewel of a painter," old Mata, indoors, would say.
"Look at him, master,--a noble figure, indeed, standing on one leg like
a love-sick stork!" And Kano, helpless before his own misery and the
old dame's acrid triumph, would keep silence, only muttering
invocations to the gods for self-control.

Often the young wife pretended a sudden desire for her own artistic
work. She would go hurriedly to the little painting chamber, gather
complex paraphernalia, and assume the pose of eager effort. Tatsu
always followed her but, once within the room, bent such laughing eyes
of comprehension that she dared not look into his face. Nevertheless
she would paint; tracing, mechanically, the bird and flower studies in
which she had once taken delight. Just in the midst of some specially
delicate stroke, Tatsu would snatch her hands away, press them against
his lips, his eyes, his throat, hurl the painting things to the four
corners of the room, drag her down to his strong embrace, and triumph
openly in the victory of love. The young wife, longing from the first
to yield, attempted always to repel him, protesting in the words her
father had bade her use, and urging him to rouse himself and paint, as
she was doing. Then the young god would laugh magnificent music,
drowning the last pathetic echo of old Kano's remembered voice.
Catching her anew he would crush her against his breast, fondling her
with that tempestuous gentleness that surely no mere man of earth could
know, would drag up her faint soul to him through eyes and lips until
she felt herself but a shred of ecstacy caught in a whirlwind of
immortal love.

"So that we be together,
Even the Hell of the Blood Lake,
Even the Mountain of Swords,
Mean nothing to us at all!"

He would sing, in the words of an old Buddhist folk-song. At such
supreme heights of emotion she knew, consciously, that Kano's grief and
disappointment were nothing. She did not really care whether Tatsu
ever touched a brush again,--whether, indeed, the whole visible world
fretted itself into dust. She and Tatsu had found each other! The
rest meant nothing at all!

Such moments were, however, the isolated and the exception