most terrible troubles never happened.

PEKING, February, 1912.

_Mate_:

I do not know whether I can write you sanely or not. But write you
I must. It is my one outlet in these days of anxious waiting. I
have just cabled Billy Milton, in Nebraska, to come by the first
steamer. I have not an idea what he will do when he gets to Japan,
or how I will help him; but he is my one hope.

Yesterday, on our arrival here, I found a desperate letter from
Sada San, written hurriedly and sent secretly. She finds that the
man Hara, whom her uncle has promised she shall marry, has a wife
and three children!

The man, on the flimsiest pretest, has sent the woman home to clear
his establishment for the new wife. And, Mate, can you believe it,
he has kept the children--the youngest a nursing baby, just three
months old!

One of the geisha girls in the tea-house slipped in one night and
told Sada. She went at once to Uncle and asked him if it was true.
He said that it was, and that Sada should consider herself very
lucky to be wanted by such a man. Upon Sada telling him she would
die before she would marry the man, he laughed at her. Since then
she has not been permitted to leave her room.

The lucky day for marriage has been found and set. Thank goodness,
it is seventeen days from now, and if Billy races across by
Vancouver he can make it. In the meantime Nebraska seems a million
miles away. I know the heartbeats of the fellow who is riding to
the place of execution, with a reprieve. But seventeen days is a
deadly slow nag.

I had already told Jack of my anxiety for Sada San and of the fate
that was hanging over her, but now that the blow has suddenly
fallen I dare not tell him. In a situation like this I know what
Jack would want to do; and in his present weakened condition it
might be fatal.

It is useless for me to appeal to anybody out here. Those in Japan
who would help are powerless. Those who could help would smile
serenely and tell me it was the law. And law and custom supersede
any lesser question of right or wrong. By it the smallest act of
every inhabitant is regulated, from the quantity of air he breathes
to the proper official place for him to die. But, imagine the
_majesty_ of any law which makes it a ghastly immorality to mildly
sass your mother-in-law, and a right, lawful and moral act for a
man, with any trumped-up excuse, to throw his legal wife out of the
house, that room may be