Page:My Japanese Wife.djvu/184

170 I have heard something, too, about their drugs, and my memory of their fantastic and extraordinary nature does not tend to reassure me.

He is a little, oldish man with gimlet eyes in a face full of wrinkles, which seem to serve no other purpose than to disguise his emotions if he has any. He treads softly across the matting floor, with Oka’s wife hovering, anxious-faced, in the rear.

“Madame the most honourable lady has been unwell some time?” he inquires in a high-pitched key, with an insinuating inflection on the first word, which many people annoy me with when referring to Mousmé.

“No.”

“No!” and his eyebrows depart upward from overhanging his narrow, beady black eyes.

“Her illness dates but from an hour or two ago.”