THE DRAGON PAINTER
Umè-ko danced (or so she would have told you) only to fulfil her father's command; yet, before she had reached the room, she knew that it would be such a dance as neither she nor the old artist had dreamed of. That first glimpse of Tatsu's face at the gate had registered for her a notch upon the Revolving Wheel of Life. His first spoken word had aroused in her strange mystic memories from stranger hiding places. Karma entered with her into the little guest-room where she was to dance and charged the very air with revelation. The words of the old classic poem she had in her ignorance believed familiar, she knew that she was now for the first time really to sing.
"Not for one life but for the blossoming of a thousand lives, shall I seek my lover, shall I regain his love," she sang. No longer was it Umè-ko at all, but in actual truth the Dragon Maid, held from her lover by a jealous god, seeking him through fire and storm and sea, peering for him into the courts of
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