The latter was deep in discussion with Patricia, moving her hands in quick, vivacious gestures which clusters of opals made into flashes of blue fire. "But you must send to Hakodate for your furs," she was saying. "I will give you the address of my man there. You should get them now, not wait till fall, when the tourists have bought all the best." "I'm dying for an ermine stole." "Oh, my _dear_, not ermine! Get sables. One can be so insulting in sables!" Barbara laughed with the rest. "What a nice lot you are," she said, "all knowing each other, all friendly. I thought diplomatists were always poring over international law books and drawing up musty treaties." "It's not all cakes and ale," he asserted. "I worked till three this morning on a cipher telegram." "After the melodrama?" "Ah, it was opera!" he protested. "It has left me memories of only flowers, and scents and music!" "You made most of the music, if I remember rightly." "How unkind! I could no more help it than fly." "On your Glider?" He laughed again. "Don't forget what is to happen one day with that same machine." "What is that?" "I am to swoop down and carry you off. It was your own suggestion, you know." "But it was to be at the Imperial Review. That doesn't happen again for a year." "I won't wait that long!" She turned her head; her eyes sparkled in the caught light. Her fingers were fluttering a square of red paper that had been rolled about her chopsticks. On it was a line of tiny characters. "What is that writing?" "That is a love-poem," he answered. "You know a Japanese poem has only thirty-one syllables. You find them everywhere and on everything, from a screen to a fire-shovel. I've seen them printed on tooth-picks. Your huckster composes them as he brings the fish from market, and your _amah_ writes them at night by a firefly lantern." "Can you read it?" He translated: "_I thought my love's long hair drooped down from the gate of the sky. But it was only the shadow of evening._" "How delicately pretty!" she exclaimed. "It's written in _kana_, the sound-alphabet, isn't it?" "Yes. How much you have learned already!" "Haru has begun teaching me. Let me show you my proficiency." She took his pencil and wrote: [Japanese: Donto] "There! who would guess that was Japanese for 'Daunt.' And what an impression you must have made on Haru for her to select your name as my first lesson!" Across the soft _shoo-shoo_ of spotless, _tabi_-clad feet, the flitting of bright-hued _kimono_, the gay badinage that flew about the low tables, Daunt felt her beauty thrill him from head to foot like a garment of mist and fire. As she dropped her hand to the cushion it had touched his, and for an instant their pulses had seemed to throb into one. The tiny, lacquered cup she took up trembled in her fingers.