y tell me. She sits in her
garden in the dusk, playing her lute, and singing the song of the
Willow branches, which is the saddest love-song in the world...

"And why she should be singing a sad love-song, is a mystery, for her
soft, brown beauty is the flower of the world. For there would be no
lack of suitors for her, nor is she the one to refuse love. The only
thing I make of it is that the right hour hasn't come.

"The beauty of Venice jumps to your eyes, but the beauty of this pulls
at your heart. Little brown Golden Bells, in her Chinese garden,
singing the song of the Willow Branches at the close of day... Is that
not better nor Venice?"

But he got no word out of Marco Polo, sitting with his chin cupped in
his hands. And that was the finest answer at all, at all...

CHAPTER V

The times went by, and Marco Polo busied himself with his daily
affairs, keeping track of the galleasses with merchandise to strange
far-away ports, buying presents for refractory governors who didn't
care for foreign trade in their domains, getting wisdom from the old
clerks, and knowledge from the mariners; in the main, acting as the son
of a great house while the heads of it were away.

You would think that he would have forgotten what the sea-captain of
China told him about Golden Bells, what with work and sport and other
women near him. You would think that would drop out of his memory like
an old rime. But it stuck there, as an old rime sometimes sticks, and
by dint of thinking he had her fast now in his mind--so fast, so clear,
so full of life, that she might be some one he had seen an hour ago or
was going to see an hour from now. He would think of the now merry,
now sad eyes of her, and the soft, sweet voice of her by reason of
which they called her Golden Bells, and the dusky little face, and the
hair like black silk, and the splotch of the red flower in it. She was
as distinct to him as the five fingers on his hand. It wasn't only she
was clear in his mind's eye, but she was inside of him, closer than his
heart. She was there when the sun rose, so he would be saying, "It's a
grand day is in it surely, Golden Bells." She was there in the dim
counting house and he going over in the great intricate ledgers the
clerks do be posting carefully with quills of the gray goose, so that
he would be saying: "I wonder where this is and that is. Sure I had my
finger on it only a moment ago, Golden Bells." And when the d