"Never! Never! Ne?" answered Gwendolen, trying to smile. Yuki turned, and went back as a prisoner to an inky cell. * * * * * Out on the street, at the carriage-step, two pleasing Americans paused, and eyed each other much with the expression of a pair of young game-cocks. "Well!" said the tan-colored fowl, superbly, "why do you hesitate? Is it to beg paw-don of some one?" "I beg paw-don?" echoed the other, in mild surprise. "No, certainly not! How could you fawncy such a thing? Do _you_?" Gwendolen, with a muffled exclamation, sprang unaided into the carriage. "Go on! Hurry up! American Legation--Koshikwan, I mean! This beastly lingo--" she cried to the driver, and so far forgot herself as to prod him in the American flags. The startled servant looked down and over her, to Dodge, for confirmation. "It's all right, betto!" said Dodge, airily, in Japanese. "I prefer walking back. Take the august young lady home by a long, long road! She has become honorably overheated!" Gwendolen gave the speaker one helpless glare, threw herself back in the seat, and was gone. Dodge stood in the middle of the road, looking after the carriage until bamboo hedges closed in upon it, and the noises of its rattling wheels faded into the myriad sounds of the city below him. CHAPTER SIXTEEN The month of March was at hand. Tempestuous winds howled and whirled in the pine and camphor trees, in the flame-like, springing bamboo groves, and under temple eaves. The air was full of petals and scraps of green. Sometimes a tiny flake of flint stung the face, and between the teeth an uncomfortable grit blew in. Angry gray clouds piled high from the north, westward from the Atlantic, eastward from that "rough and black" water we call the Yellow Sea. The very firmament was in torment. The wind, combated at once by many currents, tore at times great eddies in the gray, letting the sun down in avalanches of light. Yuki saw the shadow and the sun pass, like fleeting ghosts, across the garden; felt the chill and warmth alternating in their wakes. The wind tossed cruelly the branches of cherry-trees, where sharp-pointed buds in clusters, just showing a first hint of pink, were set. The plum-tree was bare but for a few timid green leaves. Now and then a twig or branch snapped, and fell sharply on the gravelled pathway, where instantly one of the blue-robed gardeners advanced to pick it up. In the cowed house Yuki moved like some waxen automaton, living only in the one sense of hearing. Every cry from the street, every wind-jangle of the gate-bell, sent her currents of hope and apprehension. Tetsujo grimly ignored the intensifying strain, but Iriya's pitying eyes turned more often to her child. The servants kept to themselves, whispering and exchanging glances.