uld not endure the double blow!" The old woman began to
sob in her upraised sleeve, apologizing through her tears for the
discourtesy. The physician comforted her with kind words, and thanked
her very sincerely for the visit. Her disclosures did, indeed, throw
light upon a difficult situation.

From the hospital the old servant made her way to Uchida's hotel, to
learn that he had gone the day before to Kiu Shiu. With this tower of
strength removed Mata felt, more than ever, that Kano's sole friend was
herself. The loss of Ume was still to her a horror and a shock. The
eating loneliness of long, empty days at home had not yet begun; but
Mata was to know them, also.

Kano, during the first precarious days of his son's illness,
practically deserted the cottage, and lived, day and night, in the
hospital. His pathetic old figure became habitual to the halls and
gardens near his son. The physicians and nurses treated him with
delicate kindness, forcing food and drink upon him, and urging him to
rest himself in one of the untenanted rooms. They believed the
deepening lines of grief to be traced by the loss of an only daughter,
rather than by this illness of a newly adopted son. In truth the old
man seldom thought of Ume-ko. He was watching the life that flickered
in Tatsu's prostrate body as a lost, starving traveller watches a
lantern approaching over the moor. "The gods preserve him,--the gods
grant his life to the Kano name, to art, and the glory of Nippon," so
prayed the old man's shrivelled lips a hundred times each day.

After a stupor of a week, fever laid hold of Tatsu, bringing delirium,
delusion, and mad raving. At times he believed himself already dead,
and in the heavenly isle of Ho-rai with Ume. His gestures, his
whispered words of tenderness, brought tears to the eyes of those who
listened. Again he lived through that terrible dawn when first he had
read her letter of farewell. Each word was bitten with acid into his
mind. Again and again he repeated the phrases, now dully, as a wearied
beast goes round a treadmill, now with weeping, and in convulsions of a
grief so fierce that the merciful opiate alone could still it.

The fever slowly began to ebb. For him the shores of conscious thought
lay scorched and blackened by memory. More unwillingly than he had
been dragged up from the river's cold embrace was he now held back from
death. His first lucid words were a petition. "Do not keep me al