"He does love me!"

"I know that much."

"But he does not know it--yet."

They laughed again.

"It WAS for _his_ happiness!"

"Certainly!"

"Not mine!"

"No!"

"He shall be told that he loves me!"

She shook her fist at her favorite deity, sitting unruffled in her shrine.

"Benten! You shall let him know!"

"The G.o.ddess is too decorous for that," chided the maid. "The only woman who tells a man that she loves him--"

"Is me!" cried her mistress to the shocked maid.

"Aie!" wailed the maid. "There is a kind of woman who does that, but she is not the lady Hoshi--"

"Oh, silence!" laughed the girl. "It would not take me a moment to tell him, if it were not for what he might think! And, perhaps, he is not wise and will not know enough wisdom to think that!"

"All men think that!" said Isonna.

"But, how can they," argued Hoshiko, "if they are not taught? How can he if I do not teach him?"

"It is born in them!"

"But how do you know?"

"I have studied," said the maid.

"Well, at all events, it was not that for which I pet.i.tioned the G.o.ddess: to tell him--that I loved him, you ignorant little animal. I asked her to tell him that he loved me!"

"Oh!" cried the maid, kowtowing. "I misunderstood."

"Now go to bed, you little scandal-monger!"

Isonna started. Her mistress recalled her.

"And--and, if there is a way of letting him know that _he_--"

"Yes," answered the maid, understandingly.

"And as to letting him know that I love _him_--"

"Yes?"

"Do you think that necessary?"

"I do not know the ways of love," confessed Isonna.

"You are a little beast," said her mistress. "That can wait--if he once knows that he loves me. At all events it is too dangerous. Go to bed, wicked one!"

IMPERTINENT ISONNA

XII

IMPERTINENT ISONNA

But the next day trouble, though not exactly of the heart, did arrive.

It was one of Arisuga's days of retreat from Hoshiko. He asked her why she lived there--in China--when she might live in j.a.pan, where she belonged.

She answered him that her father had come there many years before, when she was a child.

"I will ask him the reason if you wish."

"No, no, no!" laughed Arisuga. "What does it matter, my dear child?"

She ran away from him again. And all that day she kept repeating:--

"'My dear _child_'! I am as tall as he!"

And at night, again, while the maid was undressing her, it was that still.

"Now he shall never know who--what I am. For I _am_ beautiful. The mirror says so. As beautiful as if I were not--what I am. Look, look and tell me!"

This the maid, for the hundredth time since he had come, did.

"You are, indeed, beautiful, dear mistress, yet, nevertheless, it is your duty to tell him! Otherwise he might wish to marry you. Already he loves you."

"I will not! And if you do, I will kill you!" threatened Hoshiko. "I will have these few days of heaven. He will go and not think of me again. He will never know. He will not have been contaminated. But I will have the few days in heaven! To him I am only a child."

And she fell to the floor and sobbed for an hour, during which the maid lay like a graven image at her side. Then she sat up and asked: