THE DRAGON PAINTER
her father had bade her use, and urging him to rouse himself and paint, as she was doing. Then the young god would laugh magnificent music, drowning the last pathetic echo of old Kano's remembered voice. Catching her anew he would crush her against his breast, fondling her with that tempestuous gentleness that surely no mere man of earth could know, would drag up her faint soul to him through eyes and lips until she felt herself but a shred of ecstacy caught in a whirlwind of immortal love.
"So that we be together,
Even the Hell of the Blood Lake,
Even the Mountain of Swords,
Mean nothing to us at all!"
He would sing, in the words of an old Buddhist folk-song. At such supreme heights of emotion she knew, consciously, that Kano's grief and disappointment were nothing. She did not really care whether Tatsu ever touched a brush again,—whether, indeed, the whole
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