Page:Sidnay McCall--The dragon painter2.djvu/150

 it, wrapped in white paper, to her own room. The father, ashamed now, and filled with genuine remorse, had stormed up and down the garden paths, reviling himself for an impatient ogre, and promising more restraint in future. Mata, silent for once, had crept to her child-mistress' close-shut walls, heard the last sobbing words of a Buddhist prayer for the dead, and burst through the shoji in scant time to catch back the stroke of a dagger from the girl's slim, upraised throat. Her terrified screams summoned Kano and the neighbors as well. A priest hurried down from the temple on the hill. In time the culprit was reduced to a condition of tearful penitence, and gave her promise never again to attempt so cowardly and wicked a thing as self-destruction, unless it were for some noble and impersonal end.

The good old priest, to comfort her, chanted a sutra over the bier of her lost playmate, and bestowed upon it a high-sounding Buddhist kaimyo which Kano carved, in his