"Pshaw!" said Bersonin. "Do you take me for a fool not to guess? Come, we needn't quarrel. Our interests are the same. Go home, now, to your Japanese butterfly--and wait!" CHAPTER XLV THE BISHOP ANSWERS A SUMMONS The Chapel was but sparsely filled. From where she sat, Barbara, through the open door, could see the willows along the disconsolate roadway whipping in the fleering dashes of wind. A woman trudged by, bare-legged, her _kimono_ tucked knee-high, the inevitable, swaddled baby on her back. The hot, fibrous song of the _semi_ had died to a thin humming, like bees in an old orchard. Across the bishop's voice she heard the plaintive call of a huckster, swinging by in slow dogtrot with panier-pole on shoulder, and the chirr of a singing-frog under the hedge. The service was in the vernacular, and though she tried to follow it in her _Romaji_ prayer-book--whose words were printed in Roman letters instead of the Japanese ideograph--the lines were meaningless, and she could not fasten her mind on them. She had reached a point in these few tragical days where her mind, overwrought with its own pain, had acquired a kind of benumbing lassitude that was not apathy and yet was far removed from spontaneous feeling. Daunt's presence that dreadful night on the hillside--his confusion--his bleeding hand--his round-about return to the hotel--all this, at the sight of the Damascene crop in the bushes, had flashed to her mind in damnable sequence. And yet something deep and unfathomed within her had driven her to the obliteration of that mute evidence. Austen Ware had slipped and fallen--such was the universal verdict. The truth was sealed for ever in the urn now bound over-seas to its last resting-place. She alone, she thought, knew the secret of that Nikko tragedy. With the next daylight the storm had broken and the ensuing gloomy weather had formed a dismal setting for gloomier scenes, through which she had moved dully and mechanically. When all was over, to Patricia's sorrow, she had not returned to the Embassy, but had gone immediately to her uncle's. The pity offered her--though not openly expressed, since her engagement had not been formally announced--hurt her like physical blows, and the quiet of the Ts'kiji rectory was some solace. To-night, an unwelcome task lay before her. She was to visit the yacht--now, by a satiric freak of chance, legally her own!--to seal the private papers of the man whose deed of gift might not now be recalled.