.

"Tea-house!" said the rickshaw man, stopping and grinning. It was
clearly expected of the foreigners that they should descend and enter.

"Shall we get out and explore, sweetheart?" suggested Geoffrey. They
passed under the low gate, up a pebbled pathway through the sweetest
fairy garden to the entrance of the tea-house, a stage of brown boards
highly polished and never defiled by the contamination of muddy boots.
On the steps of approach a collection of _geta_ (native wooden clogs)
and abominable side-spring shoes told that guests had already arrived.

Within the dark corridors of the house there was an immediate
fluttering as of pigeons. Four or five little women prostrated
themselves before the visitors with a hissing murmur of "_Irasshai_!
(Condescend to come!)."

The Barringtons removed their boots and followed one of these ladies
down a gleaming corridor with another miniature garden in an enclosed
courtyard on one side, and paper _shoji_ and peeping faces on the
other, out across a further garden by a kind of oriental Bridge of
Sighs to a small separate pavilion, which floated on a lake of green
shrubs and pure air, as though moored by the wooden gangway to the
main block of the building.

This summer-house contained a single small room like a very clean box
with wooden frame, opaque paper walls, and pale golden matting. The
only wall which seemed at all substantial presented the appearance of
an alcove. In this niche there hung a long picture of cherry-blossoms
on a mountain side, below which, on a stand of dark sandalwood,
squatted a bronze monkey holding a crystal ball. This was the only
ornament in the room.

Geoffrey and his wife sat down or sprawled on square silk cushions
called _zabuton_. Then the _shoji_ were thrown open; and they looked
down upon Nagasaki.

It was a scene of sheer enchantment. The tea-house was perched on a
cliff which overhung the city. The light pavilion seemed like the
car of some pullman aeroplane hovering over the bay. It was the brief
half-hour of evening, the time of day when the magic of Japan is at
its most powerful. All that was cheap and sordid was shut out by
the bamboo fence and wrapped away in the twilight mists. It was a
half-hour of luminous greyness. The skies were grey and the waters of
the bay and the roofs of the houses. A grey vapour rose from the town;
and a black-grey trail of smoke drifted from the dockyards and from
the steamers in the harbour. The c