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 Japan, 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 Japan we shall be in time to see the cherry-blossoms.'"

"Why," asked Geoffrey, "do the Japanese 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 Japanese
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 Japanese 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 scum 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 Japanese 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 Sta