"You are like a pretty picture on a fan," she said; "the prettiest Japanese girl I've seen. I think we'll be fine friends, don't you?"
Yuki could only assent with a weary little nod of her head. She closed her eyes.
"You are not so dreadfully sick, are you?" said the American. "I thought maybe we could have a nice little gossip together. You see, my husband's the boss of this whole outfit that we've got along with us, and I don't know that there's one of the whole lot I've ever cared to associate with before. You're different. Now, ain't I good to speak out just what's on my mind, eh?"
"I _ought_ to thang you," said Yuki, feebly, "but I am too weary to be perlite."
"Then you shall be left alone, you child, you," said the other; then she kissed Yuki lightly, and went out of the door.
But after she had gone Yuki's passivity left her. She sat up quivering, and then with nervous quickness she began to dress herself. She could not open the door of the stateroom. She was unused to strange doors that required the pushing of springs and bolts. She had lived in a land where bolts and locks were almost unknown, where a shoji fell apart at a touch of a hand. Now she pushed hard against the door, but, as she had not turned the handle, it refused to move. A terror possessed her that they had locked her in this tiny, awful cell, to which penetrated no light save that which filtered through a small porthole against which the waters beat and beat.
She flung herself desperately against the door, battering it with her tiny hands; she felt herself growing dizzy and blind as the ship rocked and swayed beneath her feet. She tried to pace the tiny length of the stateroom, her sense of terrible loneliness and homesickness deepening with every moment. The moving of the ship horrified her, and the knowledge that it was taking her farther and farther from her home across the immense bottomless sea filled her with a terror akin to nothing She had ever known in her life before.
In the sickening, wearying dazzle of the few days previous to their sailing, the girl's mind had held but one thought--to go far away from the scenes of her pain; now perhaps the reaction had come, and her terror at the step she had taken appalled her. Memory, which had been thrust out of sight by the ever-present nagging pain that had blinded her to all else, now asserted its power, merciless and invincible. She pressed her hands to her head, as though to blot out forever from her mind the pitiless ghosts that haunted her.
