A half-hour later she stood before a wistaria-roofed gate in _Kasumiga-tani Cho_--the "Street-of-the-Misty-Valley"--near Aoyama parade-ground. The glass lantern above it threw a dim light on a gravel path twisting through low shrubbery. Down the street she could hear a dozen students chanting the marching song of Hirosé Chusa, the young war hero: "Though the body die, the spirit dies not. He who wished to be reborn Seven times into this world, For the sake of serving his country, For the sake of requiting the Imperial Favor-- Has he really died?" Haru opened the gate. Cherry-petals were sifting down like rosy snowflakes over the scarlet trembling of _nanten_ bushes. A little way inside was a graceful house entrance half-shaded by a trailing vine. The _amado_ were not closed, the _shoji_ were brilliantly lighted. With a little sob she unfastened the golden _obi_, rewound and tied it with the knot in front. CHAPTER XXXIV ON THE KNEES OF DELILAH The room where Phil sat was softly bright with _andon_, through whose thin paper sides the candle-light filtered tranquilly. It had been furnished in a plain, half-foreign fashion; a book-rack and a French mahogany desk sat in a corner, an ormolu clock ticked on its top, and beside it was a lounge piled with volumes from the shelves. On a bracket sat three small carvings in dark wood, replicas of the famous monkeys of the great Jingoro the Left-Handed, preserved in Iyeyasu temple at Nikko. With their paws one covered his eyes, another his ears, the third his mouth, representing the "I see not--I hear not--I tell not" of the ancient wisdom. The place, however, to which these had given a suggestion of quaint and extraordinary art, was now touched with a certain tawdriness. It would have affected a Japanese almost to nausea. The severity of beauty of its etched and paneled walls, the plain elegance of its satinwood fittings, were cheapened with a veneer of vulgarity. A row of picture postcards in colors was pinned on the wall--the sort the tourist buys for ten _sen_ on the Ginza, too highly tinted and with much meretricious gilding--and a photograph hung in a silver-gilt frame of interlocked dragons. It showed a girl in abbreviated skirts and exaggerated posture; on the mount was printed: "Miss Cissy Clifford in _Gay Paree_." The air was full of the sickly-sweetish smell of Turkish cigarettes. The desk was a confusion of pipes, ivory _nets'ke_, cigarette-boxes and what not, and a man's cloth cap and a gauntlet were tossed in a corner, beside an open gold-lacquer box heaped with gloves. Phil, however, felt no qualm. The room fitted him as a scabbard fits its sword. He had discarded his heavier outer clothing and donned a loose, wide-sleeved robe of cool silk, tied with a crimson cord.