"Ma-a-a!" she heard old Suzumé cry. "This is not the master I have known for fifty years. He must be bewitched by a fox." Maru gave a little giggle, which the elder woman quickly suppressed. Iriya, in the guest-room, moved like a cat. Yuki knew that all were against her,--spies, enemies. Passages from the Psalms of her Christian Bible came to the girl. "They compass me round about on every side. I am set in the midst of snares." She ran out into the garden, now, listening for sounds of violence from the street. Nothing came but the wailing of wind. Tetsujo returned as abruptly as he had gone. Yuki, steeling herself against the look of aversion certain to be met, went before him, not questioning, but searching his face with haggard eyes for some possible sign of at least a will-conflict between him and Pierre. She fancied, in her abnormal state of mind, that something of Pierre's thought must cling to his enemy, and so be transmitted to her. But Tetsujo's face was as blank and expressionless as the glazed side of one of Suzumé's tea-jars on the kitchen shelf. Unable to breathe longer that overweighted air, Yuki caught up a gray shawl from her room, and went boldly out again into the garden. The rain had ceased entirely. The wind, though fiercer when it came, came at increasing intervals. Through one of these temporary lulls Yuki reached the bleak little pond. The encircling rocks appeared older, grimmer, and more shrunken. A few of the bordering plants had been twisted and split. One was overturned, its ochre roots clutching at the unfriendly air, the evergreen branches plunged deep into quivering gray water. As if in wonder that so frail a creature as a girl should dare its strength, the storm, crouching and growling for a last effort, hurled the full bulk of its viewless majesty upon her. She was beaten bodily upon the rocks. But for the protecting shawl she might have been blinded, or the long black hair torn from her. For an instant breath stopped; but in the wake of it came exultation. Lifting her head, she smiled a challenge to the storm to snatch her faint soul from her lips, and bear it far, like a petal, on that streaming tide of heaven. The blue-robed gardeners, crouching in the shelter of a rock, stared at her in wonder. Iriya's face came for one white instant to the veranda and vanished. Yuki could hear the very timbers groan. The bands of dead bamboo, lashed in horizontal strips to the living hedge, squeaked and buckled, and squeaked again, in absurd imitation of animate torture. In the pond the pear-shaped water was smitten into one gelatinous, cowering mass.