rds Tatsu. Answering her father's
unrelenting frown, she murmured, timidly, "To-morrow, if the gods will,
my dear husband shall paint."

Tatsu's steady gaze drew her. "Your eyes, Ume-ko. Is it true that for
this--to make me paint--you consented to become my wife?"

Ume tried in vain to resist the look he gave her. Close at her other
hand, she knew, her father hung upon her face and listened, trembling,
for her words. To him, art was all. But to her and Tatsu, who had
found each other,--ah! She tried to speak but words refused to form
themselves. She tried to turn a docile face toward old Kano; but the
deepening glory of her husband's look drew her as light draws a flower.
Sullenness and anger fell from him like a cloth. His countenance gave
out the fire of an inward passion; his eyes--deep, strange, strong,
magnetic--mastered and compelled her.

"No, no, beloved," she whispered. "I cannot say,--you alone know the
soul of me."

A fierce triumph flared into his look. He leaned nearer, with a smile
that was almost cruel in its consciousness of power. Under it her eyes
drooped, her head fell forward in a sudden faintness, her whole lithe
body huddled into one gracious, yielding outline. Even while Kano
gasped, doubting his eyes and his hearing, Tatsu sprang to his feet,
went to his wife, caught her up rudely by one arm, and crushed her
against his side, while he blazed defiant scorn upon Kano. "Come
Dragon Wife," he said, in a voice that echoed through the space; "come
back to our little home. No stupid old ones there, no prattle about
painting. Only you and I and love."

[Illustration: "'Come, Dragon Wife,' he said, 'come back to our little
home.'"]

Now in Japan nothing is more indelicate, more unpardonable, or more
insulting to the listener than any reference to the personal love
between man and wife. At Tatsu's terrible speech, Ume-ko, unconscious
of further cause of offense, hid her face against his sleeve, and clung
to him, that her trembling might not cast her to the floor. Kano, at
first, was unable to speak. He grew slowly the hue of death. His
brief words, when at last they came, were in convulsive spasms of
sound. "Go to your rooms,--both. Are you mad, indeed,--this
immodesty, this disrespect to me. Mata was right,--a Tengu, a
barbarian. Go, go, ere I rise to slay you both!"

The utterance choked him, and died away in a gasping silence. He
clutched at his lean chest. Ume would h