The Key of Dreams - A Romance of the Orient (1922) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II I COULD not piece the story together as I went slowly back. Perhaps it was better I should not?yet the strange tie that bound me to the man whose all I had taken, thrilled like a harp- string. I called my servant, Tazaki, and in a few minutes he had put the book in my hand. Yes, on the last page?the first of course, of a Japanese book, was written in a small hand "Miyuki Yama- shina," with a date of some years ago and the name of a place?"Haruna." Why, that was here It was to be my expedition of tomorrow. The Haruna Temple, the wild Haruna valley. Then Lance too knew it all?the memories of him here would be thick as motes in the sunbeam. No wonder that it stirred me. as I came up from Maebashi, for I was entering a soul- complex that might well survive what we call death and vibrate in the lonely woods where a woman sat alone and mourned?as I believed. There was also something written on the inner cover?in hiragana, the running character used much by women and those who cannot master the Chinese characters. I could not read it and in any case would not now have done so, but I looked long at it, for it seemed like a message or a quotation from some letter, and that space had the air of having been more thumbed and read than the rest. The secret slept in France and as far as I was concerned, there it should sleep. I caused Tazaki to wrap up the book in politest Japanese fashion, securing it with knots of scarlet twine, and so directed it and sent it to the room Tie knew she occupied. No answer was returned. I slept ill that night. There was a crying in the wind that had sprung up; the wooden shutters rattled; the trees sighed, and in my own heart was a sighing. I saw her sitting among them, a bowed figure, the smile dropped like a useless mask from feature...