She broke one of them and let the crumbs fall. “They say these fish are very old,” she observed; “hundreds of years, and they come regularly to the balcony to be fed. Think of all the interesting people who have thrown crumbs to them!” “Can you think of any one as interesting as you?” he said, half playfully. She made no answer, but continued feeding the carp. “That biggest one,” she observed, “looks very wise. I wonder if he remembers what the Shoguns gave him.” “Probably all crumbs are very much alike to him,” said the youth. He finished putting on his shoes and joined her by the rail. “We ought to take a walk about,” he suggested, after a pause. “There are a number of things to see--the Shogun’s well, the Shogun’s island, and the hill in the distance, the silk hat mountain which he used to have covered with white silk on hot July days so that it would look like snow.” “The mountain is outside the garden,” said the girl. “It would be too far to go to it. Anyway,” she added, “I don’t think I had better leave the balcony. You see, auntie might come down. Where are you going, after you leave Kioto?” she asked, presently. “I don’t know,” he answered. “There are two friends of mine in my regiment coming up to get rid of the fever. I may join them and go into the mountains. But I’m so well now that I really have no excuse to stay here much longer.” “I should think that it would be nice to spend a summer in Japan with brother officers whom you knew well,” she observed. “Do you?” he said. “Yes,” she replied. “Wasn’t it odd,” she continued, after a pause, “that we should meet you out here when we hadn’t seen you for a year and a half, and then on the other side of the world?” “Yes, it was odd,” he said, but he smiled a little as if to hint that it was not so very odd, if one knew the inside facts. “Of course, we had heard how you had been wounded,” she went on, slowly, “but we thought you were still in the Philippines.” “I heard in a letter from home,” he said, “that you expected to come to Japan, but I didn’t know where you were to be.” She looked down at the carp again and crumbled another biscuit for them. “You promised last night,” she said, “to tell me how you won the Medal of Honor. Will you tell me now?” Caswell started in spite of himself and looked at the youth with surprise. “Williams!” he said to himself. “That is so; it _was_ a Lieutenant Victor Williams.” He knew the story. Every newspaper on the coast of Asia had printed it. “It is strange,” he thought. “He is only a boy.” Under the guise of looking into the water, he bent forward intently to listen. He was curious to hear that extraordinary narrative from the young man’s own lips. “It doesn’t make much of a story,” Williams replied. “The first thing we knew, a lot of _hombres_ got around us and cooped us up in a stone church. Bradshaw, my captain, was knocked over in the first firing.” “Killed?” she asked.