Page:My Japanese Wife.djvu/52

38 No, he wouldn’t come in and have anything. Whisky saké would not tempt him, and “brantwein” was too much for his head, with still a good way down-hill yet to go.

My house had never seemed so lonely.

I fancied, strange though it may appear, that something—which after all had never existed—was missing. The tiny rooms seemed vast, the matting floor almost unfamiliar in its deadly silence.

The servants are at rest, of course. I think all I have to do is to push aside a panel and enter. There are no locks; and if there were, they would be but toy ones, ingenious, but useless all the same. I have a cash-box, a European one of tin, but I have given it a rice-paper jacket, because it looked so terribly substantial amid all my other frail belongings.

How lonely it is! Even Oka the cook’s snoring down in the basement does not prove so companionable as usual.