Mousmé waved her hand sympathetically, and then we sat down together on the veranda to watch the last hours of a New Year’s Day glide into the æons of the past. ****** One day is so very much like another to me in this strange land, where I have the lightest of business duties to perform, few friends other than Kotmasu, and no great desire to gain any more, though I find the natives I know vastly more interesting than the few English who are settled more or less permanently in Nagasaki for business or other purposes.
Everything has a certain charm—Mousmé always—but four long years have robbed my surroundings of that subtlest of all interests, novelty. I am eager to test my experiment, which is answering here so admirably, with a new environment.
“Mousmé in Bond Street.” Kotmasu’s phrase haunts me with a sinister purpose, but I am not to be daunted easily, for I have
