He teased her, and taught her, and played with her, as he would have played with a merry child. Naturally gentle and affectionate, he unconsciously swept Yuki San to the borderland of that golden world where to awaken alone is agony. One morning, when the heavy mists of the valley lay in masses of pink against the deeper purple of the mountain, and his Highness, the sun, his face flushed from his long climb, was sending his first glances over the sunny peaks of Fuji-yama, Yuki San arose, after a sleepless night, and faced the morning with sorrowful eyes. "You ve'y lazy, Mister Sun, this morning," she said, shaking a finger at him in reproof; "where you the have been? Why you not come the more early and make light for my busy?" She tied the long sleeves of her bright kimono out of her way, and twisting a bit of cloth about her head, fell to dusting the _shoji_ and setting the small room in order. "I must the hurry," she said, as she kept up her brisk dusting. "I make the food so quick as that Robin San steal berry for his babies. To-day him one big, big day, but him no glad day. Merrit San go away." She paused in her work, and a look of pain darkened her eyes, but she shook her head reproachfully. "Ah, Yuki San, you make sorry voice and your heart is thinking tears. You naughty girl! Quick you make the fire to rise in _hibachi_ and give that Merrit San his _gohan_--same thing what that funny 'Merica call breakfast." After the steam had begun to rise from the vessels on several _hibachi_, Yuki San, flushed by her exertions, rested upon her heels before the door that led into the garden. As she fanned her flushed face with her sleeve, she glanced again and again toward the narrow stairway that led to the chamber above, and at the slightest sound she listened in smiling expectancy. From outside the wall came the gentle slip-slap of the water against the _sampan_, and the cheerful banter of the owners as they made ready for the work of the day. Circling the garden, the fern-like maples made a note of vivid crimson amid the feathery green of the bamboo. Every feature of the place was closely associated with her short happy life. She had learned to walk on the soft sandy paths, she had spelled out her first characters on the old stone-lantern. She had whispered her secrets to the broken-nosed image of Kwannon, who sat in the shadow of the pines, and there under the plum-tree she had caught the naughty kitten that first brought her and Merrit San together. As she sat, with folded hands, and watched the sunshine on the dewy leaves and flowers, her intense, restless, vivacious body relaxed in sudden languor and her soft mouth drooped in wistfulness. A splash in the pool below attracted her, and looking down she saw the gleaming bodies of the goldfish as they leaped into the air. Instantly she was all life and volubility.