The people wondered he did not become a priest--fair evidence that his conscience had been awakened. By day he sits among his bales of Kyoto silks and Osaka figured goods--earnest and silent. His clerks think him a good master; he never speaks harshly. Often he works far into the night; and he has changed his dwelling-place. There are strangers in the pretty house where Haru lived; and the owner never visits it. Perhaps because he might see there one slender shadow, still arranging flowers, or bending with iris-grace above the goldfish in his pond. But wherever he rest, sometime in the silent hours he must see the same soundless presence near his pillow--sewing, smoothing, softly seeming to make beautiful the robes he once put on only to betray. And at other times--in the busiest moments of his busy life--the clamor of the great shop dies; the ideographs of his ledger dim and vanish; and a plaintive little voice, which the gods refuse to silence, utters into the solitude of his heart, like a question, the single word--"Anata?" THE END End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Kimiko and Other Japanese Sketches, by Lafcadio Hearn