Bersonin sank back in his seat, his massive frame quivering, his eyes glittering like flakes of mica. But for this, in ten minutes he would have been clear of the city, flying along the Chiba Road! What if he were detained? He felt strange, chilly tendrils plucking at his flesh, and a hundred fiery needles seemed pricking through his brain. Peering over his shoulder, with his horrible fear on him, he saw the crowd part to admit a woman who, quite silently, but with haste, came forward and knelt on the ground. There was no movement from the crowd. In a hush like that of death, the mother rose with Ishikichi in her arms. The white, still face looked pitifully small. One clog swayed from its thong between the bare toes. The faded _kimono_ was stained with red. She spoke no word. There was no tear on her face. But in the dreadful silence, she turned slowly with her burden and looked steadily at the twitching face in the car--looked and looked. The chauffeur swung himself from the seat into the crowd. An insane desire had been creeping stealthily on Bersonin. He had felt it coming when he faced the truth in Phil's cringing admission. The horrible compulsion to laughter was on him. The damnable man-hysteria had him by the throat. He fought it desperately, as one fights a wild beast in the dark. In vain. His jaws opened. He laughed--a dreadful peal of merriment that echoed up and down the latticed street. And as he laughed, he knew that he raised a peril nearer, more fearful even than that from which he had been flying. There was an instant's shocked calm, like the silence which follows the distant spurt of blue flame from the muzzle of a Krupp gun. Then, like its answering detonation--in such a menacing roar as might arise from the brink of an Inferno--the silence of the quiet street burst into awful sound. * * * * * Ten minutes later but a single lighted _shoji_ glimmered on the darkened thoroughfare. The roadway was deserted save for a soldierly figure in policeman's uniform who stood thoughtfully looking at a huddle in the dim roadway--a mixture of wrenched and battered iron and glass, in the midst of which lay an inert, shapeless something that might have been a bundle of old clothes fallen from a scavenger's cart. CHAPTER LII THE VOICE IN THE DARK Barbara rested ill in her cabin bed that night. Confused dreams troubled her, mingling familiar thoughts in kaleidoscopic confusion, dragging her from one tangle to another in a wearying rapidity against which she struggled in vain. One thing ran through them all--the gold-lacquer Buddha that had stood on the Sendai chest in her bedroom at the Embassy; only it seemed to be also that lost image before which she had used to sit as a child.