Pierre had sprung from some unknown shadow. He must have been watching her and listening to her words. He paused now, debonair, handsome, though a little pale, directly beneath an outcurving granite petal of the Buddha's throne. As she still stared, speechless, he struck a match against the bronze and lighted a cigarette. She could not see, for her own trembling, how his poor hands shook. The red match glare revealed his face as distorted, evil, sinister. "Well," he remarked once more, "have you nothing to say to me?" This time she tried to speak, but no sound came. Her power of motion, too, was in abeyance. He moved three deliberate steps nearer. As though the air were glass, and she repelled by its material force, she went backward the answering distance. Her left hand, clutching behind her, found something hard and cold, and fastened to it eagerly. It was the fin of a bronze dragon in full relief, twining upward, about the trunk of a tall lantern. "Yes, go," she whispered. "Do not speak more words. Go!" Pierre took another stride. She cowered back bodily into the writhing folds. "For the love of God!" she panted. "What if one has ceased to love God?" "In mercy then--in pity--in human pity--go!" Pierre laughed. "_You_ enjoin pity, Madame Hagané? How quaint!" "I am more deeply hurted now than you; but never more must I be weak. I am a wife. I shall serve my native country!" "Does treachery and faithlessness ever serve? You delude yourself. If Hagané is to be your strength, you will fail,--for either Hagané or I must die. I live now only to revenge myself upon him!" The emptiness of the boast, the impotence of the suffering boy to wreak the harm he wished, did not then come to her. The words rang sombre and terrible. "No--no, Pierre," she cried, "not that! Our Emperor needs him--our country needs. Revenge on me, Pierre! I only was faithless. I deserve all harm you will give." "Yes, you were faithless, but it came because of weakness, and the low status of your sex in this barbaric land. Hagané and your father forced you. They threatened, cowed you--tortured you, for all I know. Look at your hands! Mon Dieu, your little hands!" She held them forth to him with a gesture that might have disarmed Beelzebub. "I tore them myself upon that hedge the night you came,--the night I had promised Prince Hagané." Pierre glared at her an instant longer. Oh, he had meant to be so harsh! Nothing was to have softened his just wrath. Through sleepless nights he had scourged himself with memory until his soul was flayed. Yuki should not appeal to him or move him. He would get from her own lips some faltering explanation of her perfidy. Yet now, for all his armor of resolve, two little torn hands held out silently through deepening gloom pulled at his heart,--drew down the visor from his quivering face. Above them bent, like a great cloud, the head and stooping shoulders of the Buddha.