A Maid of Japan #266778

She was of the sea, the little white maiden. Sixteen years ago a woman had come down to the shore on such a night as this with her life's flower, a tiny bud then, in her arms. She stood alone on the stainless sands and watched a great ship sail away under the moon; and her heart went with it in the keeping of one who neither knew nor cared. He was a man of a distant land, a lazy, blue — eyed man who would not forego his pleasure, but preferredto have it authorised — a Philistine to whom some Calvinistic forefather had bequeathed a lively belief in the tortures of the damned. It was the strongest dogma of his creed, and no temptation was yielded to unless he could arrange to cheat the Prince of Darkness of the hold it might otherwise have given him upon a self-indulgent yet timorous soul.