Jizo--" she was praying to the goddess at her small shrine that
night--"I am going to conceal and lie! I pray you to intercede with the
Lord Shaka for my pardon. He loves me--and he must not know. It is for
happiness, Jizo. _His_ happiness, do you understand, dear Jizo?"

She cried out savagely in her further confidences to Jizo that night,
when she was ready for bed.

"I _was_ very busy--yes, _very_ busy--falling in love with him! And you
must intercede with Shaka for my forgiveness. It was a lie. But could I
tell him that I was busy falling in love with him?"

The maid had come in to put her to bed.

"Strange prayers!" she said.

The mistress turned, intending to rebuke her. But she laughed.

"Come here and stop that laughing. He will hear!"

"Mistress, I did not laugh."

"Come here!"

When the maid was abject before her she said:--

"Why do you stare?"

"At the joy."

"Where?"

As if it were a symptom of disease.

"In the face."

"I have a trouble of the heart. Feel! That is why!"

"Yes!" said the maid, pretending terror.

"It will kill me!"

"Yes!"

"It will not!"

"No!"

They fell, laughing, together, to the floor.

"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 goddess 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 petitioned the
goddess: 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!"

Is