ge, and we talked of the country, unknown
to both, to which destiny was now carrying us. As we were to cast anchor
the next day, we enjoyed our anticipations, and made a thousand plans.

"For myself," I said, "I shall marry at once."

"Ah!" said Yves, with the indifferent air of one whom nothing can
surprise.

"Yes--I shall choose a little, creamy-skinned woman with black hair and
cat's eyes. She must be pretty and not much bigger than a doll. You shall
have a room in our house. It will be a little paper house, in a green
garden, deeply shaded. We shall live among flowers, everything around us
shall blossom, and each morning our dwelling shall be filled with
nosegays--nosegays such as you have never dreamed of."

Yves now began to take an interest in these plans for my future
household; indeed, he would have listened with as much confidence if I
had expressed the intention of taking temporary vows in some monastery of
this new country, or of marrying some island queen and shutting myself up
with her in a house built of jade, in the middle of an enchanted lake.

I had quite made up my mind to carry out the scheme I had unfolded to
him. Yes, led on by ennui and solitude, I had gradually arrived at
dreaming of and looking forward to such a marriage. And then, above all,
to live for awhile on land, in some shady nook, amid trees and flowers!
How tempting it sounded after the long months we had been wasting at the
Pescadores (hot and arid islands, devoid of freshness, woods, or
streamlets, full of faint odors of China and of death).

We had made great way in latitude since our vessel had quitted that
Chinese furnace, and the constellations in the sky had undergone a series
of rapid changes; the Southern Cross had disappeared at the same time as
the other austral stars; and the Great Bear, rising on the horizon, was
almost on as high a level as it is in the sky above France. The evening
breeze soothed and revived us, bringing back to us the memory of our
summer-night watches on the coast of Brittany.

What a distance we were, however, from those familiar coasts! What a
tremendous distance!

MME. CHRYSANTHEME

BOOK 1.

CHAPTER I

THE MYSTERIOUS LAND

At dawn we beheld Japan.

Precisely at the foretold moment the mysterious land arose before us,
afar off, like a black dot in the vast sea, which for so many days had
been but a blank space.

At first we saw nothing by the rays of the rising sun