gleamed like pearls on the lichen-covered, twisted limbs of the old
"dragon-plum" by Ume's chamber ledge, when Tatsu and his adopted father
entered once more together the little Kano home. If the young husband
had realized, all along, what this coming ordeal might mean, he had
given no sign of it. Kano and the physicians feared for him. The last
test, it was to be, of sanity and of endurance. The actual hour of
departure from the hospital fell late in January. More than once
before a day had been decreed, only to be postponed because of a sudden
physical weakening--mysterious and apparently without cause--on the
part of the patient.

"I will return with you as soon as I may," Tatsu had assured his father
on the day of reading Ume's letter. "I will try to live, and even to
paint. Only, I pray you, speak not the name of--her I have lost."

This promise was given willingly enough. Kano's chief difficulty now
was to hide his growing happiness. It was much to his interest that
the subject of Ume be avoided. Even a dragon painter from the
mountains must know something of certain primitive obligations to the
dead, and for Ume not even an ihai had been set up by that of her
mother in the family shrine. When Tatsu learned this he would marvel,
and probably be angry. If by his own condition of silence he were
debarred from attacking Kano, so much the better for Kano.

It was this disgraceful and unheard-of negligence--a matter already of
common gossip in the neighborhood--that added the last measure of
bitterness to old Mata's grief. Was her master demented through sorrow
that he so challenged public censure, and was willing to cast dishonor
upon the name of his only child? Hour after hour in the lonely house
did the old dame seek to piece together the broken edges of her
shattered faith. The master had always been a religious man,
over-zealous, she had thought, in minute observances. Yet now he was
willing to neglect, to ignore, the very fundamental principles of
social decency. Personally he had seemed wretched enough after Ume's
loss. The kindly neighbors had at first marvelled aloud at his
whitening hair and heavily burdened frame. Mata, pleased at the
sympathy, did nothing to distract it; but in her heart she knew that it
was Tatsu's illness, not his daughter's death, that bore upon old Kano
like the winter snow upon his pines.

On that most sacred period of mourning, the seven-times-seventh day
after