She bent over the pillow and began again the elfin drumming at the infant's ear. But Ishikichi lay open-eyed on his _f'ton_, his baby mind grappling with a new and painful wonder. CHAPTER XII IN THE STREET-OF-PRAYER-TO-THE-GODS Haru unlatched a gate across which twisted a plum-branch with tarnished, silver bark. It hid a garden so tiny that it was scarcely more than a rounded boulder set in moss, with a clump of golden _icho_ shrubs. Across the path, high in air, were stretched giant webs in whose centers hung black spiders as big as Japanese sparrows. Beyond was a low doorway, shaded by a gnarled _kiri_ tree. The thin, white rice-paper pasted behind the bars of its sliding grill shone goldenly with the candle-light within. She rang a bell which hung from a cord. "_Hai-ai-ai-ai-ee!_" sounded a long-drawn voice from within, and in a moment a little maid slid back the _shoji_ and bobbed over to the threshold. Her mistress stepped from her _géta_ into the small anteroom. Here the floor was covered with soft _tatamé_,--the thick, springy rice-straw mats which, in Japan, play the part of carpets--and a bronze vase on a low lacquer stool held a branch of dark ground-pine and a single white lily. A voice was audible, reciting in a droning monotone. It stopped suddenly and called Haru's name. She answered instantly, and parting the panels, passed into the next room, where her father sat on his mat reading in the faint soft light of an _andon_. He was an old man, with white head strongly poised on gaunt shoulders. Broken in fortune and in health, the spirit of the _samurai_ burned inextinguishably in the fire of his sunken eyes. He took her hand and drew her down beside him. She knew what was in his mind. "Be no longer troubled," she said. "The American _Ojo-San_ is as lovely as Ama-terasu, the Sun Goddess, and as kind as she is beautiful. I shall be happy to be each day with her." "That is good," he said. "Yet I take no joy from it. You are the last of a family that for a thousand seasons has served none save its Emperor and its _daimyo_." "I am no servant," she answered quickly. "Rather am I, in sort, a companion to the _Ojo-San_, to offer her my tasteless conversation and somewhat to go about with her in this unfamiliar city. It is an honorable way of acquiring gain, and thus I may unworthily pay my support, for which now from time to time you are brought to sell the priceless classics in which your soul exaltedly delights." His face softened. "I have lived too long," he said. "My hand is palsied--I, a two-sword man of the old clan! I should have died in the war, fighting for Nippon and my Emperor. But even then was I too dishonorably old! Why did not the gods grant me a son?--me, who wearied them with my sacrifices?"