"No," said the disgraceful young soldier, "there is no need of haste."

She laughed and touched his face--where he caught and held her hand.

"Perhaps, many many years?"

"Perhaps," said Arisuga.

"Until you are mi--married?"

"Perhaps until I am married."

"Beautiful!" cried the girl.

"And who would you have me marry?"

"Isonna!" laughed Hoshiko, "if you were not so great, lord. Oh, she is most sweet to men! Often I have wondered that men do not marry her!

Isonna!"

Again the girl plunged from the next room.

"Isonna," said her mistress, "ugly little beast, you are to marry the lord soldier when he is a trifle better."

Isonna forgot her manners in the violence of another amazement. Arisuga shouted with happy laughter.

"Vast lord," wailed the maid, as if she believed it all, "there is the same reason in me as in my mistress, that--"

"Sh!"

Hoshiko put her two hands violently upon the garrulous mouth of the servant.

"You little beast! Is not once enough? I dislike to kill you. But I suppose I must!"

When all was well again she turned to Arisuga:--

"Then you will need a servant--and I am very industrious, am I not, Isonna?"

Isonna said nothing. This seemed safest.

"Is she industrious, Isonna?" asked the mystified young soldier. "We will have no servants who are not industrious!"

"No," said the frightened maid to him, and "Yes" to her when she had looked, first, the way of her mistress, then the way of the soldier.

"Do I not curl the futons, dress my hair, fill my father's pipe, clean the sand out of his sandals, mend his bed-netting, tie his girdle, cook his rice?"

Isonna said yes.

"I am convinced," laughed the soldier. "When I marry Isonna you shall serve us."

"Go," said the girl to the maid, "and be ready when the lord commander wishes."

And when she was gone the young soldier and the girl laughed again together.

"Almost," said the girl, "she lost me my place in your household."

And one could not be certain from her words that she was not serious.

The soldier had again the impression that she had barely prevented some momentous disclosure. It gave his gayety pause and his coquetry caution.

"Then I am not in a heaven," said he, "and--_you_ are not a heavenly person?"

The girl dropped to her knees beside him and asked:--

"I wish I might make this a heaven to you, and that I might seem--truly--like--a heavenly--person!"

"I never knew one on earth who seemed more like one! Be content."

"Alas! that is only because you have been ill and I have been kind to you?"

"You are very pleasant--very pleasant!" said Arisuga, setting the current of desire away from the peril of her. "What have you been doing with me all the while I have been here?"

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding his retreat from sentiment, the wounded soldier possessed himself of one of Hoshiko's hands--quite by an unconscious act of fellowship. But one was not enough; he took the other. As he did it, he remembered and smiled because his hands and his will were at such variance.

The Lady Hoshi did not stay him. Indeed, she had always liked the stories of those bandits in the mountains, who took pretty girls and were never heard of again.

But she had to get away just then, much to her regret, because, out of her innocent honesty, she was not prepared to answer the question he had asked her--What had she been doing with him during the period of his delirious unconsciousness? And he repeated it!

Now to call one a pleasant person is about as far as a j.a.panese lover ordinarily goes. But Hoshiko was disappointed with it. What had gone before promised more.

In her disappointment, her humor became as testy as it was possible for her humor to become, which was, after all, not very testy. And so it remained for the day.

THE TASK OF JIZO

X

THE TASK OF JIZO

"Why didn't he take me?" she demanded savagely of Isonna the maid that night as she was putting her mistress to bed in the adjoining room. "And quickly! Like that! I would!" She clapped her hands--and then said: "Sh!

Do you think he heard that?"

The maid rea.s.sured her.