She turned her head and furtively wiped her eyes. "If I could only be sure!" she said. "But I think how I should feel--if it were Patsy, Ned!" * * * * * And while they talked, Barbara lay in her blue-and-white room, wide-eyed in the dark. The smiling, ball-room mask had slipped from her face and left it strained and white. She had drawn the curtain and shut out the misty glory of the garden--and the small white cottage across the scented lawn. In those few agonized hours of the afternoon, while she had lain there thrilling with suffering, something deep within her had seemed to fail--as though a newly-lighted flame, white and pure, had fallen and died. Where it had gleamed remained only a painful twilight. It had been a different Barbara that had emerged. The fairest fabric of those Japanese days had crashed into the dust, and in the echo of its fall she stood anchorless, in terror of herself and of the future. The harbor of convention alone seemed to offer safety--and at the harbor entrance waited Austen Ware. At the ball the die had been cast. Outside the window she could hear the rasp of the pine-branches and the sleepy "korup! korup!" of a pigeon. A tiny night-lamp was on the stand beside her. Its gleam lit vaguely the golden Buddha on the Sendai chest. Its face now seemed cold and blank and cruel, and in its dim light, on the shadowy wall, sharp detached pictures etched themselves. She saw herself looking at Austen Ware's yacht, set in that wonderful, warm, orient bay--a swift, white monitor, watching her! She saw a yellow rank of convicts filing into the yawning mouth of Shimbashi Station--like the long, drab years of savorless lives! She saw the great white plaster figure over the entrance-arch of the Yoshiwara--beckoning to hollow smiles that covered empty hearts! Over the thronging pictures grew another--a misty, nightgowned little figure who stood by her, whispering her name. Patricia, after sleepless hours, crept from her bed to Barbara's room, longing for some assurance, she knew not what, some breath of the old girlish confidences to melt the ice that seemed to have congealed between them. And Barbara, with the first phantom of softened feeling she had known that night, took the other into her arms. But it was she who comforted, whispering words that she knew were empty, caressing the younger girl with a touch that held no tremor, no hint of those anguished visions that had floated through the leaden silences of her soul. Till at last, Patricia, half-reassured, smiled and fell asleep; while Barbara, her loose gold hair drifting across the pillow, her bare arm nestling the dark, braided head beside her, lay stirless, staring into the shadows, where the pale glimmer of the Buddha floated, a ghostly _chiaroscuro_. CHAPTER XL THE SHADOW OF A TO-MORROW