e must be told when this has happened to
him. And it must be in another tongue than his. For in his language
there are no words for it--and he knew no other. He really was not quite
sure, therefore, why he was lingering in China--only suspected it. How
could he know, under the circumstances? No feeling like this had
insidiously crept upon him when he had taken Yone to Mukojima or
Shiba--even upon that great night which now began to go more and more
out of his memory. And he did not even think of what he had laughingly
prophesied to her--that forgetting--her waiting. He simply forgot her.
Perhaps if Hoshiko had known of this defect in the character of Arisuga,
she might not have loved him. What Arisuga remembered most about his and
Yone's excursions was that when they got hungry they went separately
home and ate. But he had the feeling that he would stay here with
Hoshiko and starve--or until some one from the regiment came and took
him back at the point of a bayonet. For this was a most piquant and
unusual condition of affairs between them: that they should be so much
alone together, that there should be so little--almost nothing--of
Hoshiko's parents, that she should be as frankly intimate as a geisha at
a festival, who meant to please at all hazards. It was this volunteer
intimacy which puzzled him most about the girl. But who was there to
tell him that she had known him two weeks longer than he knew her? And
that during all that halcyon time she had had her way with her adoration
of him--and saw no reason in his returned consciousness for changing
it? Or that she had lived here untaught as a child? That to her, since
she frankly adored him, there was only one reason why he might not as
frankly know it--the one she had decided never to tell?

Before Arisuga became a soldier he had been a poet, a musician, a
songster--one who had responded at nature's high behest to all
manifestations of beauty. Now, in this time of peace and indolent
convalescence, he went back to all that--almost as if the life of the
soldier, which intervened, had never been. He had instantly called her
"Dream-of-a-Star." And she was all this to him. It was good to lie in
his futons and see the perfections of her grace as she moved about
intent upon his healing. It was better to hear her pretty voice. It was
best of all to feel her touch upon him and to see the lighted eyes which
always accompanied it. At first there was the sense of having found a