"How strange! It doesn't seem to belong, somehow, with the telegraph wires and the trolley cars. Japan is full of such contrasts, isn't it? It seems to be packed with mystery and secrets. Listen!" The deep, resonant boom of a great bell at a distance had throbbed across the nearer strumming. "That must be in some old temple. Perhaps the man with the drum is going there to worship. Does any one live in the temples? The priests do, I suppose." "Yes," he answered. "Sometimes other people do, too. I know of a foreigner who lives in one." "What is he? European?" "No one knows. He has lived there fifteen years. He calls himself Aloysius Thorn. I used to think he must be an American, for in the Chancery safe there is an envelope bearing his name and the direction that it be opened after his death. It has been there a long time, for the paper is yellow with age. No doubt it was put there by some former Chief-of-Mission at his request. He has nothing to do with other foreigners; as a rule he won't even speak to them. He is something of a curiosity. He knows some lost secret about gold-lacquer, they say." "Is he young?" "No." "Married?" "Oh, no! He lives quite alone. He has one of the loveliest private gardens in the city. Sometimes one doesn't see him for months, but he is here now." She was silent, while he looked again at the white toe of the slipper peeping from a gauzy hem. The silence seemed to him an added bond between them. The moon, tilting its slim sickle along the solemn range of western hills, touched their jagged contour with a shimmering radiance and edged with silver the vast white apparition towering, filmily exquisite, above them, a solitary snowy cone, hovering wraith-like between earth and sky. The horizon opposite was deep violet, crowded with tiny stars, like green-gilt coals. In the quiet a drowsy crow croaked huskily from the hillside. Barbara looked through dreamy eyes. "It can't always be so beautiful!" she said at length. "Nothing could, I am sure." "No, indeed," he agreed cheerfully. "There are times when, as my number-one boy says, 'honorable weather are disgust.' In June the _nubai_, the rainy season, is due. It will pour buckets for three weeks without a stop and frogs will sing dulcet songs in the streets. In July your head feels as if a red-hot feather pillow had been stuffed into your skull and everybody moves to Chuzenji or Kamakura. If it weren't for that, and an occasional dust-storm in the winter, and the centillions of mosquitoes, and a weekly earthquake or two, we wouldn't half appreciate this!" He made a wide gesture. "Yet now," she said softly, "it seems too lovely to be real! I shall wake presently to find myself in my berth on the _Tenyo Maru_ with Japan two or three days off."