hand, with its cool, white fingers, rested in mine.
“I shake the hand English way,” she explained, with a ripple of laughter. And then, with low bows to the other ladies, Kotmasu and I leave the merry party in the pagoda, and go away down the steep path bordered with the staring sunflowers.
I had read a few days before—and laughed at the idea a line—in a verse of a decadent poet that,
“Woman gone,
The darkness wraps us round in sable pall.”
But now I did not laugh; I felt it, and understood.
I could have sworn that all the lanterns were extinguished, that the stars had gone down. And why? Because Kotmasu and I had turned our backs upon a pair of sparkling eyes, and I had put a hundred feet or so between me and Miss Hyacinth’s beguiling, coquettish personality.
