"You are a wonderful friend," said Yuki. Her voice had the strange quality of her look. Both had caught the rhythm of low martial chanting. "But even you, my Gwendolen, did not hear or understand it all. There is tragedy before me. You did not hear that in the music?" "I thought I heard it, darling, but I shut my ears! I shall not believe. We can compel even tragedy, Yuki. Nothing can harm you with Hagané's love!" "It is of that the tragedy come. But do not trouble. If I can serve Nippon, I asks no more of this life." "Yuki, what can you mean?" cried the other, holding her back. "Hush, dearest; do not trouble," smiled Yuki. "See, the guests turn their heads to listen. I must go to them. I have no fear at all." CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Throughout the months of March and early April this strange hiatus in war bulletins hung, like a gray sky, above national enthusiasm. The more dignified of the newspapers still adjured the populace to patience, still exhorted them to have faith in their wise and careful leaders. "The Hawk's Eye," on the other hand, bereft of inflammatory battle themes, served up, with new condiment of ingenious suggestion, the personal gossip of the hour. Few of the weekly issues (those printed entirely in English) omitted a guarded slur upon the conjugal felicity of the Hagané household. Gwendolen came in for her share of veiled allusion. Yuki-ko, each week stung by the contemptible malice of the attack, promised herself that never again should the paper be opened in her home. Gwendolen, at the American Legation, weekly did the same. The results of both resolutions were equally humiliating. This was not a happy time for Gwendolen, creature of sunshine and spring breezes as she seemed. The continued strained relations between herself and Dodge interfered quite seriously at times with the young man's official duties. Mr. Todd leaned more heavily than he knew upon his attaché's four past years of experience in Tokio life, and resented an attitude of one of his own family, which kept Dodge so rigidly within the paling of mere officialdom. Mrs. Todd, who had never professed great friendship for the secretary, now most loudly denounced his "outrageous flirtation" with the Spanish girl, and even declared it an affront upon her Legation. Gwendolen, urged one moment to stop the affair, "as she certainly could by the lifting of a finger," was, the instant after, taunted by her inability to do so.