"The other day when I passed," said Patricia, "it was _Waltz Me Around Again, Willie_, and forty children were prancing to it. Martha's husband is 'in' phonographs, by the way. She told me all about it at the Review. He's making a set of Japanese records--_geisha_ songs and native orchestra pieces and even street-noises--to copyright at home." Presently the horses stopped before a great gate of unpainted cedar, roofed with black and white tiles and bossed with nails of hammered copper. Above it two pine-trees writhed like a Doré print. "One of the Empress' ladies-in-waiting lives here," Patricia said. "I'll walk home and on the way I can leave some 'call-tickets'--Tucker's name for visiting-cards. Give my love to the bishop." She looked wistfully after Barbara as the latter bowled away toward Ts'kiji and her uncle's. Under her flyaway spirits Patricia had the warmest little heart in the world, loyal to its last beat to those she liked. Daunt was decidedly in this category. Like the rest, she had been weaving a cheerful little romance for these two friends. Since the evening at the Cherry-Moon, however, when the newly arrived yacht had been talked of, she had had misgivings. Yesterday, too, Barbara, while confiding nothing, had told her of Austen Ware's coming. Patricia walked up the driveway slowly and with a puzzled frown. But the girl driving on under cherry-stained sky and cherry-scented winds, knew, that one hour, no problems. She was full of the flame and pulse of youth, of a new nascent tenderness and a warm sense of loving all the world. She asked herself if she could really be the poised, self-contained girl who a few weeks ago sailed for the Orient. Some magic alchemy had transmuted all her elements. New emotions dominated her, and through the beauty before her gaze went flashing more beautiful thoughts that linked with the future. In her pocket was a letter. It had been brought to her that morning when she woke and she had read it over and over, kneeling in the drift of pillows, her red-gold hair draping her white shoulders, thrilling, murmuring little inarticulate answers to its phrases, looking up now and then to peer through the bamboo _sudaré_ to the white and green cottage across the lawn. He would not see her to-day--until evening. Then he would ask her.... As the carriage bore her on, she whispered again and again one of the sentences he had written: "There has never been another woman to me, Barbara. There never will be! My Lady of the Many-Colored Fires!" CHAPTER XXXVI BEHIND THE SHIKIRI Mr. Y. Nakajima, the almond-eyed guide of gold-filled teeth, came to the end of his elaborate conversation. He turned from the old servant, leaning on his pruning knife, and spoke to the man who stood waiting outside the wistaria-gate in the Street-of-the-Misty-Valley.