itted.

She called back the footman who had shown him in.

"China tea, very weak, in a china teapot with lemon and no sugar. Isn't
that it?" she asked, smiling.

"Lady Grace," he declared, "you spoil me. Perhaps it is because I am
going away. Every one is kind to the people who go away."

She looked at him anxiously.

"Going away!" she exclaimed. "When? Do you mean back to Japan?"

"Back to my own country," he answered. "Perhaps in two weeks, perhaps
three--who can tell?"

"But you are coming to Devenham first?" she asked eagerly.

"I am coming to Devenham first," he assented. "I called this afternoon
to let your father know the date on which I could come. I promised that
he should hear from me today. He was good enough to say either Thursday
or Friday. Thursday, I find, will suit me admirably."

She drew a little sigh.

"So you are going back," she said softly. "I wonder why so many people
seem to have taken it for granted that you would settle down here. Even
I had begun to hope so."

He smiled.

"Lady Grace," he said, "I am not what you call a cosmopolitan. To live
over here in any of these Western countries would seem to denote that
one may change one's dwelling place as easily as one changes one's
clothes. The further east you go, the more reluctant one is, I think,
to leave the shadow of one's own trees. The man who leaves my country
leaves it to go into exile. The man who returns, returns home."

She was a little perplexed.

"I should have imagined," she said, "that the people who leave your
country as emigrants to settle in American or even over here might have
felt like that. But you of the educated classes I should have thought
would have found more over here to attract you, more to induce you to
choose a new home."

He shook his head.

"Lady Grace," he said, "believe me that is not so. The traditions of our
race--the call of the blood, as you put it over here--is as powerful a
thing with our aristocratics as with our peasants. We find much here to
wonder at and admire, much that, however unwillingly, we are forced to
take back and adopt in our own country, but it is a strange atmosphere
for us, this. For my country-people there is but one real home, but one
motherland."

"Yet you have seemed so contented over here," she remarked. "You have
entered so easily into all our ways."

He set down his teacup and smiled at her for a moment gravely.

"I came with a purpose," he said. "I came in