daughter with a great tenderness and accepts her gentle caresses with a heart hunger that is such pathos it is tragedy.
Matsuo was more demonstrative to me than would have been polite had we been living in Japan, but we both respected formality, and it was years before I realized how deep were his feelings for his family.
After that remark of Mother’s and the thoughts that it aroused I delayed Hanano’s bedtime, and she had many a romp with her father after the hour when children are supposed to be asleep. One moonlight evening I came down and found them running around the lawn, chasing each other and dodging this way and that, while Mother sat on the porch laughing and applauding. They were playing, “Shadow catch Shadow.”
“I used to play that on moonlight nights when I was a little girl,” I said
“Why, is there a moon in Japan?” asked Hanano in great surprise.
“This very same one,” her father replied. “Wherever you go, all your life, you will see it above you in the sky.”
“Then it walks with me,” said Hanano with satisfaction, “and when I go to Japan, God can see my Japanese grandma.”
Matsuo and I glanced at each other, a little puzzled. Hanano had always associated the Man in the Moon with the face of God, but I did not know until afterward that she had heard a lady who was calling on Mother that afternoon express regret that “beautiful Japan is a country without God.”
Hanano’s odd idea was somewhat startling, but it was a pleasant one to her and I did not correct it. “She will learn soon enough in this practical country,” I thought with a sigh. In Japan children are saved many a puzzling heartache, for most of our people retain sympathy for childish illusions even to old age; thus poetic fancies are
