The paved yard was filling with a throng. Agitated priests and acolytes ran hither and thither and slate-colored nuns, with shaven heads and pale, frightened faces, peered through the bamboo-lattices of the nunnery. The newer temple faced the open space as usual, but across the hedged garden no ornate roof now thrust up its Tartar gables. Instead was a huddle of wreckage, upon which lay the huge roof, crumpled and shattered, like the fragments of a gigantic mushroom. From the tangle projected beam ends, coiled about with painted monsters, and here and there in the cluttered _débris_ lay great images of unfamiliar deities. Over all hung a fine yellow dust, choking and penetrating. What was under those ruins? Barbara shivered. She was quite unconscious of the mud and the pelting rain. The bishop drew her under the temple porch, and they stood together watching the men now working with mattocks, saws and with loose beams for levers, prying up a corner of the fallen roof. It seemed an hour they had stood there, when a priest, bareheaded, his robes caked with mud, came from the clustering crowd. The bishop questioned him in Japanese. Barbara guessed from his face what the priest had answered! She waited quiveringly. Through the bishop's mind swift thoughts were passing. He knew by hearsay of the recluse--knew that he was not an Oriental. He had often seen the placard on the little gate: "Maker of Buddhas." He had never passed it without a pang. It seemed a satirical derision of the holiest ideal of the West--a type and sign of reversion, a sardonic mockery of the Creed of Christ. He was a priest holding the torch of the true light to this alien people, and here, a dark shadow across its brightness, had stood this derisive denial. Yet now, perhaps, this man stood on the threshold of the hereafter--and he was a man of his own race! He turned to Barbara. "Wait here for me," he said. "I am going in. I will come back to you as soon as I can." CHAPTER XLVI THE GOLDEN CRUCIFIX