He drew her out of the crowd and they walked slowly down a side street to the road that skirts the brawling Alpine torrent, rushing between its steep stone banks. Here the spray filled the air with a cool mist and the westerning sun tied the seething water with silver tasseling. Caravans of panier-laden Chinese ponies passed them, led by women in tight blue breeches with sweat-bands about their heads, and squads of uncomfortable tourists bound to Chuzenji, the summer capital of the _Corps Diplomatique_, crumpled in sagging red-blanketed chairs hanging from the bearing-poles of lurching, bronze-muscled coolies. Young peasant girls trotted by swinging baskets of yellow asters and purple morning-glories. A _rick'sha_ carried a baby with gay-colored dolls and painted cats of _papier-mâché_ tied behind it, on its way to the family shrine where the toys could be blessed. The _rick'sha_ man was smiling, but his cough rattled against Barbara's heart. A line of white-robed Buddhist pilgrims trudged along under mushroom hats, with rosaries crossed over their breasts and little bells tinkling at their girdles on their way to worship the Sun on the sacred mountain of Nantai-Zan. Now and then the cut-velvet of the hills rolled back to display clumps of dwellings--the wizard-gray of thatched roofs set in a rippling sea of leaves--and green flights of worn stone steps, staggering up to weird old temples where droning priests were ever at prayer. At the bottom of the road the stream narrowed to a gorge, spanned by the sacred red-lacquer bridge which no foot save the Emperor's may ever tread. On the farther side the wooded hills rose in fantastic, top-heavy shapes like a mad artist's dream. Everywhere they were split and seamed by landslide, gashed by torrents and typhoon, but covered with a wealth and splendor of color. Here and there century-old cryptomeria stood like gray-green bronze pillars, towering over younger forests as straight and symmetrical as Noah's-ark trees. As they walked, Ware chatted of his trip up the China coast--an interesting recital that took Barbara insensibly out of herself. More than once he looked at her curiously. Since that fateful hour when he had stood behind the _shikiri_, he, like Barbara, had gone through much to look so unflurried. He had known moments of bitterness that were galling and stinging, and that left behind them a sense of degradation. But he held to his course. So short-lived a thing as her love for Daunt must wither! "It will pass," he had told himself, "and she will turn to me."