For a few moments after his departure Barbara stood listening to the dulled sound of the workmen's tools. The roof of the temple opposite had a curving, Tartar-like ridge, at either end of which was a huge fish, its head pointed inward, its wide forked tail twisted high in air. Under its scalloped eaves she saw the flash of a swallow, and far above a gaudy paper kite careened in the blue. She crossed the lane and looked into the shady inclosure, where the bronze lanterns and the tombstones stood, as gray and lichened as the stone beneath her feet. Before many of the graves stood green bamboo vases holding bunches of fresh leaves. An old woman was moving noiselessly about, watering these with a long bamboo dipper and lighting incense-sticks as she went. In one place a young man knelt before an ancestral monument, softly clapping his hands in prayer. The whole place was drenched in a tone limpid and serene, the very infusion of peace. Only in the black temple interior she caught the dim glow of candles and somewhere a muffled baton was tapping on hollow wood. "Min ... Min ... Min .. Min .. Min . Min . Min-Min-Min-Minminminminmin...." At first slowly, then faster and faster, till the notes merged and died away in a muttering roll, to begin once more with the slowness of a leisurely metronome. The ornate front of the building on the right of the yard attracted her and she went nearer. Beyond the hedge she could see a portion of its garden. Reflecting that this was a temple property and hence, no doubt, open to the public, she unlatched its bamboo gate and entered. Before her curved a line of flat stepping-stones set in clean, gray gravel. On one side was a low camelia hedge spotted with blossoms of deep crimson and on the other a miniature thicket of fern and striped ground-bamboo. Beyond this rose a mossy hillock up whose green sides clambered an irregular pathway, set with tall _shinto_ lanterns and large stones, like gigantic, many-colored quartz pebbles. Here and there the flushed pink of cherry-trees made the sky a tapestry of blue-rose, and in the hollows grew a burnished, purple shrub that seemed to be powdering the ground with the velvet petals of pansies. Barbara had seen many photographs of Japanese gardens, but they had either lacked color or been over-tinted. This lay chromatic, visualized, braided with precious hues and steeped in the tender, unshamed glories of a tropic spring. For a moment she shut her eyes to fix the picture for ever on her brain. She opened them again to a flood of sunlight on the gilded carvings of the ancient structure. Its _shoji_ had been noiselessly drawn open, and a man stood there looking fixedly at her. CHAPTER XXI THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD It was the man she had seen that morning at the entrance to the little park.