They had passed into the office together. Yuki, standing alone in the centre of the big room, wan with the new rejection, watched them with a curious external interest, and dwelt in her mind upon the difference of character exhibited in the two vanishing backs. The hollow brass rings of the portiéres hissed and clashed together. A steady arm drew the wooden panels of the door. She heard a key turn. She was alone on guard. With a gesture so common to Japanese women she put both hands up lightly to her hair, patting abstractedly the shining loops. A dizziness crept under her eyelids. The ugly walls of the room began slowly to turn on axes of silence. She felt her head droop with the strange drowsiness she had known an hour before; a low moan came from whitening lips. Staggering to a window she threw up a sash, flung the blinds apart, and, clasping her clenched hands upon the sill, knelt, and let her head rest upon them. The inrush of the sweet spring winds, and this interval of quiet, following so closely upon a series of bewildering events, brought soon a balm of healing. Yuki had a nature essentially calm and self-contained. Emotion stirred and sometimes swept her from her feet, but it was an emotion that had no surface-play. Each quiver of her face answered but weakly some fundamental throb of being. She had not the usual girlish terror to bestow on scampering mice and dark corridors. Excitement generally steadied her. The one unruly, unclassifiable influence in her life had been Pierre,--his strange love-making, his exotic fascination.