The archbishop threw back his head and laughed. Then the conversation drifted again into the serious. "Of course," said the bishop, "there is at bottom the oriental inability to separate racial traits, to realize that Christianity has made Christendom's glories, not her shames. The Japanese are essentially a spiritually-minded people. Some of the West's most common vices they are strangely without. And their code of every-day morals--well, we can throw very few stones at them there!" The archbishop nodded. "Few, indeed," he said. "No Japanese Don Juan ever could exist. A Japanese woman would be scandalized by a Greek statue. She would recoil at a French nude. She would fly with astonishment and shame from the sight of a western ballet. Our whole system strikes the Oriental as not only monstrous but disgustingly immoral. It seems to him, for instance, sheer barbarity for a man to love his wife even half as well as he does his own mother and father. A curious case in point happened not so long ago. A peasant had a mother who became blind. He consulted the village necromancer, who told him if his mother could eat a piece of human heart she would get her sight back. The peasant went home in tears and told his wife. She said, 'We have only one boy. You can very easily get another wife as good or better than me, but you might never have another son. Therefore, you must kill me and take my heart for your mother.' They embraced, and he killed her with his sword. The child awoke and screamed. Neighbors and the police came. In the police court the peasant's tale moved the judges to tears. They quite understood. They didn't condemn the man to death. Really the one who ought to have been killed was the necromancer." "And this," said the bishop musingly, "only a few miles from where they were teaching integral calculus and Herbert Spencer!" His visitor sat a while in thought. "By the way," he said presently, changing the subject, "I passed your new Chapel the other day. It is very handsome. Your niece, I think you told me, built it. May I ask--" "Yes," said the host, "it is my dead sister's child, Barbara--John Fairfax's daughter." A look passed between them, and the bishop rose and paced up and down, a habit when he was deeply moved. "She came back to Japan with me," he continued. "I am to take her to see the Chapel this afternoon. Yesterday she told me that she intends it to be dedicated to her father's memory." For a moment there was no reply. Then the other said: "You have heard nothing of Fairfax all these years?" "Not a word." "She has never known?" The bishop shook his head. "She believes he died before her mother left Japan." He paused before the window, his back to the other. "He was my friend!" he said; "and I loved him. I gave my sister to him, and she loved him, too!" "I remember," said the archbishop slowly. "She went back to America from Nagasaki. How strange it was! She never told any one why she left him?"