"I suppose he must be very kind," murmured Yuki, and went with downcast looks into the street. The sense of childish anticipation, of vivid expectancy were gone. Meta, in her effort to be dutiful, had clamped more tightly the manacles her mistress had just begun to endure. Why should she wish to go? What matter that the Buddha waited? It was not for her; she could but drag before it Hagané's obedient wife, a cowed white ghost of duty. She moved forward mechanically. Her head sank still further forward, as if the great black orchid of her hair grew heavier. At every step the lacquered bars of her high clogs went deep into sand, so that it was increasingly hard to walk. A group of children, passing, looked up into the pretty lady's face for a smile, then hurried by in a small panic of fear. It is a strange woman who does not smile at children in Japan. Now she crossed at right angles the one street of the village, a rough and stony thoroughfare lined with opened booths. The street terminates abruptly at the foot of a hill whereon stands an ancient and famous temple of Kwannon the Merciful. Within a hundred yards of this hill an abrupt turn to the right leads into a country of unfenced fields of egg-plant, peanuts, and sweet potatoes; then comes another bit of hard paved road, and then the towering Red Gate of the temple grounds of Buddha. Yuki had noted dully that in little gardens the cherry trees, always earlier here than in Tokio, were fashioning their annual robes of pink. The wind from the sea, now rising, threw petals out into the air before her. She watched the fluttering signals eagerly, but for some morbid reason would not lift her eyes to the tree. She had but one thought now,--a hunger for the Buddha's face. She longed to test herself, to find whether, in the gap between the Christian Yuki and the Princess Hagané, a shred of herself still clung. This shred, it must be, that the Buddha would smile upon. Through the gate she stumbled, her gaze still on the ground. The wide stone pathway stretched soft and pink with fallen bloom. A breeze, entering with her, swept the surface in a mass, as though some one twitched the far end of a long pink rug. Petals filled the air. They came now in a small hurricane, fretting her cheeks with ghostly fingers, burrowing softly in her collar, catching and clinging to the long folds of her robe. A sob stretched in her throat and hurt her. She would not raise her eyes. She reached the two long granite steps leading up to the inner court of the Buddha. Here petals were banked in rosy drifts. She could see the bases of stone lanterns standing before the shrine. An invisible hand seemed pressing on her shoulder. "Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu!" sobbed her lost childhood through her trembling lips. An old priest, old beyond the telling, with a face as of wrinkled silver, glided out from among the flower-laden trees. "You are in great grief, my child?"