be back all too soon, perhaps before my master and Miss Ume
come down from the temple."

In this surmise the old dame was, for once, at fault. Tatsu did not
return until full daylight of the next morning. He had been wandering,
evidently, all night long among the chill and dew-wet branches of the
mountain shrubs. His silken robe was torn and stained as had been the
blue cotton dress, that first day of his coming. At sight of his
sunken eyes and haggard look Ume-ko's heart cried out to him, and it
was with difficulty that she restrained her tears. But she still had a
last appeal to make, and this was to be the hour.

In response to his angry questions, she would answer nothing but that
she and her father had business at the temple. More than this, she
would not say. As he persisted, pleading for her motives in so leaving
him, and heaping her with the reproaches of tortured love, she suddenly
threw herself on the mat before him, in a passion of grief such as he
had not believed possible to her. She clasped his knees, his feet, and
besought him, with all the strength and pathos of her soul, to make at
least one more attempt to paint. He, now in equal torment, with tears
running along his bronzed face, confessed to her that the power seemed
to have gone from him. Some demon, he said, must have stolen it from
him while he slept, for now the very touch of a brush, the look of
paint, frenzied him.

Ume-ko went again to her father, saying that she again had failed. The
strain was now, indeed, past all human endurance. The little home
became a charged battery of tragic possibilities. Each moment was a
separate menace, and the hours heaped up a structure already tottering.

At dawn of the next day, Tatsu, who after a restless and unhappy night
had fallen into heavy slumber, awoke, with a start, alone. A pink
light glowed upon his paper shoji; the plum tree, now entirely
leafless, threw a splendid shadow-silhouette. At the eaves, sparrows
chattered merrily. It was to be a fair day: yet instantly, even before
he had sprung, cruelly awake, to his knees, he knew that the dreaded
Something was upon him.

On the silken head-rest of Ume's pillow was fastened a long, slender
envelope, such as Japanese women use for letters. Tatsu recoiled from
it as from a venomous reptile. Throwing himself face down upon the
floor he groaned aloud, praying his mountain gods to sweep away from
his soul the black mist of despair tha