The Kingdom of Slender Swords

In the first touch of the shore, where the Ambassador's pretty daughter waited, Barbara's problem had been swept away. Patricia had rushed to meet her, embraced her, with a mois...

The day had been sluggish with the promise of summer, but the failing afternoon had brought a soft suspiration from the broad bosom of the Pacific laden with a refreshing coolne...

They walked together around the curving road, leaving Haru with the tea-basket. "Patsy would have come," Barbara had said, "but she is in the clutches of her dressmaker." And Da...

The spacious residence of the Minister of Marine that night was a maze of light. All social Tokyo would be at the ball in honor of the Admiral and officers of the visiting Squad...

Barbara leaned against the palpitant rail, the light air fanning her breeze-cool cheek, her arteries beating like tiny drums, atune with the throb, throb, throb, of the steel de...

The Ginza--the "Street-of-the-Silversmiths"--is the Broadway, the Piccadilly, the _Boulevard des Italiens_ of modern Tokyo. Here old and new war daily in a combat in which the n...

Barbara realized instantly and uneasily that she was an intruder. Yet she felt an intense interest, mixed of what she had heard and of what she had imagined. His _outré_ street-...

In that furious pace toward Aoyama, Daunt had been consumed by one thought: that upon his single effort hung the saving of human lives--the covering of a shame to his own nation...

Straight before her lay a wide pavement, humming with voices, lined with three-story houses that glowed with iron-hooped lanterns of red, yellow and green, and tinkled with the...

Barbara pushed open the bamboo gate of the temple garden, then paused. The recluse with whom she had talked yesterday sat a little way inside, while before him, in an attitude o...

Drowsy, lotos-eating days of summer among purple hills wound in a luminous elfin haze. Days of typhoon and straight-falling rain. Sunsets of smouldering crimson and nights under...

Dusk purpled over the rice-fields as the train sped on. Still the man who had witnessed that farewell sat crouched in his seat in the forward car, stirless and pallid.

The slowing of the train awoke Barbara from her reverie. The three boy students got out, casting sidelong glances at her. More Japanese entered, and two foreigners--a bright-fac...

Daunt accompanied his chief that evening to a dinner at the Nobles' Club--a "stag," for conventional functions had been discontinued since the royal death had cast a pall over t...

Barbara stood in her room at the Embassy. It was spacious and airy, the high walls paneled in ivory-white, with draperies of Delft blue. The bed and dressing-table were early Ad...

The setting sun poured a flood of wine-colored light over Reinanzaka--the "Hill-of-the-Spirit"--whose long slope rose behind the American Embassy, whither the Dandridge victoria...

Gradually, as they proceeded, the throng became denser. Policemen in neat suits of white-duck and wearing long cavalry swords lined the road. They had smart military-looking cap...

In the garden the moon's faint light glimmered on the broad, satiny leaves of the camelias and the delicate traceries of red maple foliage. At its farther side, amid flowering b...

On the other side of Tokyo that night Doctor Bersonin sat with Phil in his great laboratory. Dinner had been laid on a round table at one end of the room. This was now pushed in...

They rode to the parade-ground--Barbara and Patricia with the Ambassador, behind his pair of Kentucky grays--along wide streets grown festive overnight and buzzing with _rick'sh...

The bishop, and the Ambassador, when the former's call was ended that afternoon, found Barbara with Haru in the garden pagoda. She sat on its wide ledge, Haru at her feet, in a...

From the bungalow on the Yokohama Bluff, Daunt had come back to Tokyo with a sense of dissatisfaction deeper than should have been caused by his jarring talk with Phil. Perhaps,...

Nikko's thin street, with its gigantic isle of cryptomeria, was a shimmer of gold, a flicker of crimson and mandarin-blue. All the town was out of doors, for it was the _matsuri...

Daunt had dined cheerlessly in the deserted dining-room. Afterward, shrinking from the gay piazzas, he had struck off for a long rambling walk. Only the frail moonlight, glimpsi...

As Bersonin stood by the wistaria gate beside the pulsing motor, confused thoughts rushed through his mind into an eddying phantasmagoria. The fear and agitation which he had ke...

The day had dawned sultry, with a promise of summer humidity, and Daunt was not surprised to find the barometer performing intemperate antics. "Confound it!" he muttered irritab...

The room bore all the earmarks of "a rich man's plaything." It was tastefully and luxuriously furnished. The upholstery was of dark green brocade, thin Persian prayer-rugs were...

They stood in the cryptomeria shadows of Reinanzaka Hill, from which he had stepped to her side as she came from the Embassy gate. It was dark, for the moon was not yet risen, a...

The youth who stood before her now, however, was not the Phil Barbara had seen at Mukojima. There was no hint of spruce grooming in his attire; it was overlaid with the dust and...

The three-storied front of the Cherry-Moon Tea-House, when Daunt's party arrived, was glowing with tiers of large round lanterns of oiled-paper bearing a conventionalized moon a...

The street into which they trooped seemed an oriental opera-bouffe: swaying, chatting people in loose, light-colored _kimono_, some carrying crested paper lanterns tied to the e...

The building faced an open square between the Imperial Hotel and the Parliament Buildings, along one of the smaller picturesque moats, which the fever for modernization was now...

For a long time in her blue and white room Barbara lay awake, listening to the incessant chorus that came on the deepening mystery of the dark: the rustle of the pine-needles ou...

For three days the rain had fallen steadily, in one of those seasons of torrential downpour which in Japan are generally confined to the typhoon season and which flood its low-l...

As the three men listened to the swift, broken story, there was no sound save the rustle of the wind outside, the clack of a night-watchman, and the ticking of the clock on the...

When Barbara awoke next morning she lay for a moment staring open-eyed from her big pillow at the white wall above, where a hanging-shelf projected to guard the sleeper from fal...

Mr. Y. Nakajima, the almond-eyed guide of gold-filled teeth, came to the end of his elaborate conversation. He turned from the old servant, leaning on his pruning knife, and spo...

On Reinanzaka Hill the shadows were iris-hearted. From its high-walled gardens of the great came no glimpses of phantom-lighted _shoji_, no sound of vibrant strings from tea-hou...

Bishop Randolph lived in the quarter of Tokyo called Ts'kiji--a section of "made-ground" in the bay, composed, as the ancient vestry jest had it, of the proverbial tomato-cans....

It was a nervous affection which had haunted him for years. It dated from a time when, in South America, in an acute crisis of desperate personal hazard, he had laughed the firs...

The Chapel was but sparsely filled. From where she sat, Barbara, through the open door, could see the willows along the disconsolate roadway whipping in the fleering dashes of w...

Haru unlatched a gate across which twisted a plum-branch with tarnished, silver bark. It hid a garden so tiny that it was scarcely more than a rounded boulder set in moss, with...

The Ambassador received his caller in his study. From across the hall, Barbara, through the half-open door, could see the expert's huge form filling an arm-chair, where the limp...

The Ambassador, standing by the mantel, looked thoughtfully at his wife. She sat in a big wicker chair, in a soft dressing-gown, her hands clasped over one knee in a pose very p...

Through the thin paper pane, parted by his moistened finger, Ware's hot, hollow eyes saw the Japanese girl come into the room. She had not waited to shut the _shoji_ behind her....

Barbara rested ill in her cabin bed that night. Confused dreams troubled her, mingling familiar thoughts in kaleidoscopic confusion, dragging her from one tangle to another in a...

There was one whose guilty eyes were closed to the red danger so near. In the house in the Street-of-the-Misty-Valley, under the green mosquito netting, Phil lay in a log-like s...

The bishop went quickly through the crowd to a gap under the great gables, where the beams had been sawed through and the rubbish shoveled to one side, making a difficult way in...

Why had he listened so intently--made _him_ listen--to what the men in the next room were saying? He could recall it all--for some reason every word was engraven on his mind. Th...

Riding with Patricia in the big victoria next day, its red-striped runner diving ahead, Barbara forgot her vague wonder at Haru's disappearance, as she felt the enchanted myster...

The sharp sense of imminence which had come to Barbara with Austen Ware's gift remained with her that evening. The dinner was none too merry. For the first time Patricia had fai...

Not a word, not a glance of the younger man that evening, had escaped him--he had been studying him with all the minute attention of that great, overweening brain that, from an...

It had been furnished in a plain, half-foreign fashion; a book-rack and a French mahogany desk sat in a corner, an ormolu clock ticked on its top, and beside it was a lounge pil...

For all save one, sleep came early that evening to the house in the Street-of-Prayer-to-the-Gods. In her little room Haru lay as stirless as a sleeping flower. There was no soun...

On the deck of the white yacht the captain rose to his feet. The battle fought on that huddle of blankets for the life of the man so hardly snatched from the sea had been a clos...