"Really, Aubrey, you are very rude!"

"I did not mean to be," said Laking penitently. "She is a most ingratiating little creature, like a lazy kitten; but I think it is unwise for him to take her to j.a.pan. All kinds of latent orientalisms may develop."

The spring was at hand, the season of impulse, when we obey most readily the sudden stirrings of our hearts. Even in the torrid climate of Egypt, squalls of rain pa.s.sed over like stray birds of pa.s.sage.

Asako Barrington felt the fresh influence and the desire to do new things in new places. Hitherto she had evinced very little inclination to revisit the home of her ancestors. But on their return from the temples of Luxor, she said quite unexpectedly to Geoffrey,--

"If we go to j.a.pan now, we shall be in time to see the cherry-blossoms."

"Why, little Yum Yum," cried her husband, delighted, "are you tired of Pharaohs?"

"Egypt is very interesting," said Asako, correctly; "it is wonderful to think of these great places standing here for thousands and thousands of years. But it makes one sad, don't you think? Everybody here seems to have died long, long ago. It would be nice to see green fields again, wouldn't it, Geoffrey dearest?"

The voice of the Spring was speaking clearly.

"And you really want to go to j.a.pan, sweetheart? It's the first time I've heard you say you want to go."

"Uncle and Aunt Murata in Paris used always to say about now, 'If we go back to j.a.pan we shall be in time to see the cherry-blossoms.'"

"Why," asked Geoffrey, "do the j.a.panese make such a fuss about their cherry-blossoms?"

"They must be very pretty," answered his wife, "like great clouds of snow. Besides, the cherry-flowers are supposed to be like the j.a.panese spirit."

"So you are my little cherry-blossom--is that right?"

"Oh no, not the women," she replied, "the men are the cherry-blossoms."

Geoffrey laughed. It seemed absurd to him to compare a man to the frail and transient beauty of a flower.

"Then what about the j.a.panese ladies," he asked, "if the men are blossoms?"

Asako did not think they had any special flower to symbolise their charms. She suggested,--

"The bamboo, they say, because the wives have to bend under the storms when their husbands are angry. But, Geoffrey, you are never angry. You do not give me a chance to be like the bamboo."

Next day, he boldly booked their tickets for Tokyo.

The long sea voyage was a pleasant experience, broken by fleeting visits to startled friends in Ceylon and at Singapore, and enlivened by the close ephemeral intimacies of life on board ship.

There was a motley company on board _S.S. Sumatra_; a company whose most obvious elements, the noisy and bibulous pests in the smoking-room and the ladies of mysterious destination with whom they dallied, were dismissed by Geoffrey at once as being terrible bounders. Beneath this sc.u.m more congenial spirits came to light, officers and Government officials returning to their posts, and a few globe-trotters of leisure. Everybody seemed anxious to pay attention to the charming j.a.panese lady; and from such incessant attention it is difficult to escape within the narrow bounds of ship life. The only way to keep off the impossibles was to form a bodyguard of the possibles. The seclusion of the honeymoon paradise had to be opened up for once in a way.

Of course, there was much talk about the East; but it was a different point of view, from that of the enthusiasts of Deauville and the Riviera. These men and women had many of them lived in India, the Malay States, j.a.pan, or the open ports of China, lived there to earn their bread and b.u.t.ter, not to dream about the Magic of the Orient.

For such as these the romance had faded. The pages of their busy lives were written within a mourning border of discontent, of longing for that home land, to which on the occasion of their rare holidays they returned so readily, and which seemed to have no particular place or use for them when they did return. They were members of the British Dispersion; but their Zion was of more comfort to them as a sweet memory than as an actual home.

"Yes," they would say about the land of their exile, "it is very picturesque."

But their faces, lined or pale, their bitterness and their reticence, told of years of strain, laboriously money-earning, in lands where relaxations are few and forced, where climatic conditions are adverse, where fevers lurk, and where the white minority are posted like soldiers in a lonely fort, ever suspicious, ever on the watch.

The most faithful of Asako's bodyguard was a countryman of her own, Viscount Kamimura, the son of a celebrated j.a.panese statesman and diplomat, who, after completing his course at Cambridge, was returning to his own country for the first time after many years.

He was a shy gentle youth, very quiet and refined, a little effeminate, even, in his exaggerated gracefulness and in his meticulous care for his clothes and his person. He avoided all company except that of the Barringtons, probably because a similarity in circ.u.mstances formed a bond between him and his country-woman.

He had a high, intellectual forehead, the beautiful deep brown eyes of Asako, curling, sarcastic lips, a nose almost aquiline but starting a fraction of an inch too low between his eyes. He had read everything, he remembered everything, and he had played lawn tennis for his university.

He was returning to j.a.pan to be married. When Geoffrey asked him who his fiancee was, he replied that he did not know yet, but that his relatives would tell him as soon as ever he arrived in j.a.pan.

"Haven't you got any say in the matter?" asked the Englishman.

"Oh yes," he answered, "If I actually dislike her, I need not marry her; but, of course, the choice is limited, so I must try not to be too hard to please."

Geoffrey thought that it must be because of his extreme aristocracy that so few maidens in j.a.pan were worthy of his hand. But Asako asked the question,--

"Why is the choice so small?"

"You see," he said, "there are not many girls in j.a.pan who can speak both English and French, and as I am going into the Diplomatic Service and shall leave j.a.pan again shortly, that is an absolute necessity; besides, she must have a very good degree from her school."

Geoffrey could hardly restrain himself from laughing. This idea of choosing a wife like a governess for her linguistic accomplishments seemed to him exceedingly comic.

"You don't mind trusting other people," he said, "to arrange your marriage for you?"

"Certainly not," said the young j.a.panese, "they are my own relatives, and they will do their best for me. They are all older than I am, and they have had the experience of their own marriages."

"But," said Geoffrey, "when you saw your friends in England choosing for themselves, and falling in love and marrying for love's sake--?"

"Some of them chose for themselves and married barmaids and divorced persons, just for the reason that they were in love and uncontrolled.

So they brought shame on their families, and are probably now very unhappy. I think they would have done better if they had let their relatives choose for them."

"Yes; but the others who marry girls of their own set?"

"I think their choice is not really free at all. I do not think it is so much the girl who attracts them. It is the plans and intentions of those around them which urge them on. It is a kind of mesmerism. The parents of the young man and the parents of the young girl make the marriage by force of will. That also is a good way. It is not so very different from our system in j.a.pan."

"Don't you think that people in England marry because they love each other?" asked Asako.

"Perhaps so," replied Kamimura, "but in our j.a.panese language we have no word which is quite the same as your word Love. So they say we do not know what this Love is. It may be so, perhaps. Anyhow Mr.

Barrington will not wish to learn j.a.panese, I think."

Geoffrey liked the young man. He was a good athlete, he was una.s.suming and well-bred, he clearly knew the difference between Good and Bad Form. Geoffrey's chief misgiving with regard to j.a.pan had been a doubt as to the wisdom of making the acquaintance of his wife's kindred. How dreadful if they turned out to be a collection of oriental curios with whom he would not have one idea in common!

The company of this young aristocrat, in no way distinguishable from an Englishman except for a certain grace and maturity, rea.s.sured him.

No doubt his wife would have cousins like this; clean, manly fellows who would take him shooting and with whom he could enjoy a game of golf. He thought that Kamimura must be typical of the young j.a.panese of the upper cla.s.ses. He did not realize that he was an official product, chosen by his Government and carefully moulded and polished, not to be a j.a.panese at home, but to be a j.a.panese abroad, the qualified representative of a First Cla.s.s Power.

Kamimura left the boat with them at Colombo and joined them in their visit to some tea-planting relatives. He was ready to do the same at Singapore, but he received an urgent cable from j.a.pan recalling him at once.

"I must not be too late for my own wedding," he said, during their last lunch together at Raffles's Hotel. "It would be a terrible sin against the laws of Filial Piety."

"Whatever is that?" asked Asako.