"Ma-a-a-a!" she cried once. "A foreign lady, rich and educated, leave--one--chopstick--standing on its head in a bowl of rice! Ma-a! But how can I believe that? Miss Yuki must be joking." "Just think what foolish things you would do at a foreign banquet, with their awkward knives, forks, and spoons," said Yuki, smiling. Maru shook her head. This revolution of the poles of etiquette was too much for her brain. Each article of Yuki's attire, beginning with the heavy satin obi (sash), was carefully folded, pressed smooth by the hands, and put away lovingly in a lacquered clothes-chest. Sometimes Iriya performed this service, sometimes Suzumé. Yuki and Maru were both considered too inexperienced for such careful manipulation. That night it was the old warrior's turn to remain awake, staring at the ceiling, spelling out the future by the andon's dim light, and planning ways to rescue his daughter from her mad attachment without inflicting unnecessary pain. For Yuki was indeed the pride of his heart. It was a humiliation as well as a sorrow that she should be willing to repudiate her nationality. With his slow wits and somewhat rigid cast of mind he had not caught the full importance of the evening just passed, or the significance of the test in which the Red God had played so large a part. Yet in his daimyo's eye, as it rested on Yuki, he had seen something that stirred the blood in the old samurai's veins. Surely not even the ladies of the golden Fujiwara age had been more beautiful than Yuki-ko. Then, Hagané was not indifferent to beauty in women. Could it be possible-- But no! Tetsujo dared not let this fancy spread. His skull would split with it. Groaning, he turned on his wooden pillow and tried to sleep--but in vain. Meanwhile his daughter, not twenty feet away, behind her silver fusuma, lay in dreamless quiet. The certainty of Hagané's implication, and the tremendous opposition it involved, steadied and concentrated her. She knew what she had before her and deliberately willed the sleep that should bring strength. In the early dawn, within the sound of her father's restless tossing, she crouched against a shoji, and in the faint pink glow wrote an English letter. Every motion showed care. The rustling of the long sheets of Japanese paper would have betrayed her, so she wrote in pencil on a little pad that bore the name of a stationer in Washington. From time to time she consulted an open letter in a man's writing, a wild, illogical, despairing letter,--the one that Gwendolen had brought some days before.