ne, the blossoms showed in constellations,
a myriad on a single branch. Then, all too soon, the falling of wan
petals made a perfumed tragedy of snow upon the garden paths.

Tatsu grew to love the old dragon plum as Ume-ko had loved it. She was
its name-child, Ume, and he felt its sweetness to be one with her. At
night the perfume crept in to him through crannies of the close-shut
amado and shoji, revivifying, to keen agony, his longing for his wife.
There were moonlit nights he could not rest for it, but would rise,
pacing the cold, wet pebbles of the garden, or wandering, like a
distracted spirit that had lost its way, through the thoroughfares of
the sleeping town.

His whole life now, since he had cheated death, was blurred and vague.
To himself he seemed an unreal thing projected, like a phantom light,
upon the wavering umbra of two contrasting worlds. The halves of him,
body and animating thought, fitted each other loosely, and had a
strange desire to drift apart. The quiet, obedient Tatsu, regaining
day by day the strength and beauty that his clean youth owed him, was
to the inner Tatsu but a painted shell. The real self, clouded in
eternal grief, knew clarity and purpose only before a certain
flower-set shrine. He believed now, implicitly, that Ume's soul dwelt
near him, was often with him in this room. A resolve half formed, and
but partially admitted to himself,--for things of the other world are
not well to meddle with,--grew slowly in him, to compel, by worship and
never-relaxing prayer, the presence of her self,--her insubstantiate
body, outlined upon the ether in pale light, or formed in planes of
ghostly mist. Others had thus drawn visions from the under-world, and
why not he?

Even now she was, for him, the one fact of the ten existences. She
knew it and he knew it. Why should not sight be added to the
unchallenged datum of the mind. Living, they had often read each
other's thoughts. They held, he knew, as yet, their separate
intelligences,--still they could bridge a blessed duality by love.
Even now it would have surprised him little to hear the very sound of
her voice echo from the inner shrine, to feel a little white hand pass
like a cloud across his upraised brow. At such moments he told himself
that he was satisfied, she was his until death and beyond. No one
could separate them now!

These were, alas, the higher peaks of love. There waited for him, as
he knew too well, steep hi