Barbara felt the blood staining her cheeks. So that was "Phil," the brother of whom Austen Ware had told her! The name called up thoughts that had obtruded themselves in the moment she saw the white yacht lying at anchor, and which since then she had wilfully thrust from her mind. Her gaze studied the handsome, youthful form, noting the bold, restless glance, the dissipated lines of the comely face, with a sudden distaste. A twang from the orchestra recalled her, as the curtain was looped back for the _Miyako Odori_, the "Dance of the Capital." It was Barbara's introduction to a native orchestra and at first its strummings and squealings, its lack of modes and of harmony, its odd barbaric phrasing, infected her with a mad desire to laugh. But gradually there came to her the hint of under-rhythm--as when she had listened to Haru's _samisen_ in the garden--and with it an overpowering sense of suggestion. It was the remote cry of occult passions, a twittering of ghostly shadows, the wailing of an oriental Sphynx whom Time had abandoned to the eternal desert. It had in it melancholy and the enigma of the ages. It wiped away the ugly modern European buildings, the western costumes, the gloze of borrowed method, and left Barbara looking into the naked heart of the East, old, intent, and full of mystical meaning. The ivory plectrons chirruped, the flutes squeaked and wailed, the little hour-glass drums thudded, and down the stage swept sixty _geisha_, in blue, cherry-painted _kimono_. A sly, thin thread of scarlet peeped from their woven sleeves. Their small _tabi'd_ feet, cleft like the foot of a faun, moved in slow, hovering steps. When they wheeled, swaying like young bamboo, they stamped softly, and the white foot, raised from the boards, under the puffed _kimono_ edge writhed and bent from the ankle like a pliant hand. Their faces, heavily powdered, and held without expression, looked like white, waxen masks in which lived sparkling black eyes. In the slow, languorous movement their _obi_ of gold and fans of silver caught the cherry-shaded lights and tossed them back in gleams of mother-of-pearl. Barbara fell to watching the Japanese spectators. All around her they stood and sat at ease, drinking in the play of color and motion of which they never tire. The dance had no passion, no sensuality, none of the savagery and abandon of the dances of Southern Asia, with whose reproductions the western stage is familiar. Beside a ballet of the West, it would have seemed almost ascetic. She knew that it was symbolic--that every posture was a sentence of a story they knew, as old and as sacred, perhaps, as the birth of the gods. The parted curtain swung together and Daunt seated himself at Barbara's side. "Do you like it, ever so little?" he asked. "Ever so _much_!" "I wonder if you are going to like me, too," he said, so softly that no one else heard.