nd changes the current of my thoughts. I am almost
sorry I have taken the trouble to come.

Mingled with the song is a noise I cannot understand: _dzinn! dzinn!_
a clear metallic ring as of coins being flung vigorously on the floor.
I am well aware that this vibrating house exaggerates every sound
during the silence of night; but all the same, I am puzzled to know
what my mousme can be doing. _Dzinn! dzinn!_ is she amusing herself
with quoits, or the _jeu du crapaud_, or pitch and toss?

Nothing of the kind; I fancy I have guessed, and I continue my upward
progress still more gently, on all fours, with the precautions of a
Red Indian, to give myself for the last time the pleasure of
surprising her.

She has not heard me come in. In our great white room, emptied and
swept out, where the clear sunshine pours in, and the soft wind, and
the yellowed leaves of the garden; she is sitting all alone, her back
turned to the door: she is dressed for walking, ready to go to her
mother's, her rose-colored parasol beside her.

On the floor are spread out all the fine silver dollars which,
according to our agreement, I had given her the evening before. With
the competent dexterity of an old money-changer she fingers them,
turns them over, throws them on the floor, and armed with a little
mallet _ad hoc,_ rings them vigorously against her ear, singing the
while I know not what little pensive bird-like song which I daresay
she improvises as she goes along.

Well, after all, it is even more completely Japanese than I could
possibly have imagined it--this last scene of my married life! I feel
inclined to laugh. How simple I have been, to allow myself to be taken
in by the few clever words she whispered yesterday, as she walked
beside me, by a tolerably pretty little phrase embellished as it was
by the silence of two o'clock in the morning, and all the wonderful
enchantments of night.

Ah! not more for Yves than for me, not more for me than for Yves, has
any feeling passed through that little brain, that little heart.

When I have looked at her long enough, I call:--

"Hi! Chrysantheme!"

She turns confused, and reddening even to her ears at having been
caught at this work.

She is quite wrong, however, to be so much troubled, for I am, on the
contrary, delighted. The fear that I might be leaving her in some
sadness had almost given me a pang, and I infinitely prefer that this
marriage should end as it had begun, in a joke.