_Thou shalt have no other gods before Me._
And she had had to do half of them over because she had forgotten the capital M. That day her treasure had disappeared, and she had never seen it again.
The glimmering figure in the dark made her think, too, of the man of whom Daunt had told her, who shunned his own race, hiding himself for years and years in a Japanese temple, with its painted dragon carvings, glowing candles and smoking censers. The incense from them seemed now to be filling all the night with odors rich and alluring, whispering of things mysterious and confined. Striking across the lesser sounds she could hear at intervals the flute of a blind _masseur_, and nearer, in the Embassy grounds, the recurrent signal of a patroling night watchman: three strokes of one hard, wooden stick upon another, like a high, mellow note of a xylophone.
This sounded a little like a ship's bell--striking on a white yacht, whose owner was visiting the ancient capital, Nara. He would appear before long, and she knew what he would say, and what he would want her to say to him. She felt somehow guilty, with a sorry though painless compunction. The man on the steamer that morning had spoken of a younger brother who was in Japan, "going the pace." Phil--she had often heard Austen Ware speak of him. Perhaps he had only come over to keep the other out of mischief. She told herself this a second time, because it gave her a drowsy satisfaction, though she knew it was not so. She had always pictured Phil as "fast," and she wondered sleepily what the word meant here in the orient, where there were no theater suppers, and where men probably played _fan-tan_--no, that was Chinese--or some other queer game instead of poker--unless they ... had aëroplanes.
The bell of the distant temple, which she had heard in the garden, boomed softly, and the _amma's_ flute sounded again its piercing, plaintive double-note. The two sounds began to weave together with a sense of unreality, dreamy, occult, incommunicable. So at length Barbara slept, fitfully, the fragments of that lavish day falling into a bizarre mosaic, in which strange figures mingled uncannily.
She knew them for visions, and to avoid them climbed a grassy hill to a gray old temple in which she saw her father seated cross-legged on a huge lotos-flower. She knew him because his face was just like the face in the locket she wore. She called out and ran toward him, but it was only a great gold-lacquered Buddha with candles burning around it. She ran out of the temple, where a dog pursued her and a monstrous man with a pallid face, who sat in a tree full of cherry-blossoms, threw something at her which suddenly went off with a terrific explosion and blew both him and the dog into bits. It seemed terrible, but she could only laugh and laugh, because somebody held her tight in his arms and she knew that nothing could frighten her ever any more.