Page:Sidnay McCall--The dragon painter2.djvu/145

 aside to any corner where they might chance to fall, others, again, to be stored cunningly upon some remote shelf to which old Kano and Uchida and Mata could not reach, but whence he, Tatsu, the Dragon Painter, should, in a few days more, withdraw them and show them to his bride. The purple dusk brimmed his tiny garden, and yet he could not stop. Art had seized him by the throat, and shook him, as a prey. Uchida, peering at him from between the fusuma, perceived the glory and turned away in silence; nor for that day nor the next would he allow any one to approach the frenzied boy. The elder man had, himself in youth, fared along the valleys of art, and knew the signals on the peaks.

Tatsu, unconscious that the house was not still empty, painted on. Sometimes he sobbed. Again an ague of beauty caught him, and he needed to hurl himself full length upon the mats until the ecstacy was past. Just as the daylight went he saw, upon the one great glimmering square of silk as yet immaculate,