yes straining
through the darkness to see,--ah!--she could see nothing at all for the
shining!

She listened now with bated breath, thinking that by some unconscious
cry she might have aroused the others. No, Kano breathed on softly,
regularly, in the next room; while from the kitchen wing came
unfaltering the beat of Mata's nasal metronome.

In one such startled interval of waking her caged cricket had given out
its plaintive cry. All at once it seemed to Ume-ko an unbearable thing
for any spark of life to be so prisoned. She longed to set him free,
but even though she opened wide her shoji, the outer night-doors, the
amado stretched, a relentless opaque wall, along the four sides of the
house.

She lay quiet now for a long time. "I will return with the sun," he
had said. She wished that the cricket were indeed outside, and could
tell her of the first dawn-stirring. It was very close and dark in the
little room. She had not lighted the andon after all. It could not be
so dark outside. With very cautious fingers she began now to separate
the shoji that opened on the garden side. A breath of exquisite night
air rushed in to her from the lattices above the amado. It would be a
difficult matter to push even one of these aside without waking the
house. Yet, there were two things in her favor; the unusually heavy
sleep of her companions and the fact that the amado had a starting
point in their long grooves from a shallow closet very near her room.
So instead of having to remove the whole chain, each clasping by a
metal hand, its neighbor, she had but to unbar the initial panel, coax
it noiselessly apart just far enough to emit a not too bulky form, and
then the night would be hers.

There had been in the girl's life so little need of cunning or of
strategy that her innocent adventure now brought a disturbing sense of
crime. She had unlatched the first amado in safety, and had her white
arms braced to push it to one side, when, suddenly she thought, "I am
acting like a thief! Perhaps I am feeling like a thief! This is a
terrible thing and must displease the gods." Her hands dropped limply,
she must not continue with this deed. Somewhere near her feet the
cricket gave out an importunate chirp. She stooped to him, feeling
about for the little residence with tender, groping hands. She must
give him freedom, though she dared not take it for herself. Yet it
would be sweet to breathe the world for its own s