MEANWHILE, within the war-torn heart of Manchuria, the last words of Ohano came up to torment the soldier. His days and nights were made horrible by the imagined reiteration in his ears of the words of Ohano.

By the light of a hundred camp-fires he saw the face of Moonlight, the wife he had discarded at the command of the ancestors. He tried to picture it as he had first seen her, with that peculiar radiance about her beauty. She had appeared to him then like to some rare and precious flower, so fragile and exquisite it seemed almost profanation to touch her. How he had desired her! How he had adored her!

He recalled, with anguish, the first days of their marriage—a mixture of exquisite joy and pain; then the harrowing, heartbreaking months that had followed—the metamorphosis that had taken place in his beautiful wife. How timid, meek, submissive, they had made her in those latter days! He paced and repaced the ground, suffering torments incomparably worse than those of the wounded soldiers.

To think of Moonlight as an inmate of the Yoshiwara, as Ohano had insisted, the last resource of the most abandoned of lost souls, was to arouse him to an inner frenzy that no amount of action in the bloodiest encounters could even temporarily efface.

He began to count the days which must pass before his release. He knew by now that the war was soon to end. Already negotiations were under way. At first he had bitterly regretted the fact that the gods had not mercifully permitted him to give up his life; now he realized that perchance they had saved it for another purpose—the purpose of finding his lost wife. He would devote the rest of his life, he promised himself, to this undertaking; and, ah! when once again they two should meet, nothing should part them.

They would go away to a new land—a better land even than Japan—of which he had heard so much from a friend he had made out here in Manchuria. There men did not cast off their wives because they were childless. There no cruel laws sacrificed an innocent wife at the demand of the dead. There there were no licensed dens of inquity into which the innocent might be sold into a bondage lower than hell itself!

Gonji dreamed unceasingly of this land of promise, whither he intended to go when once he had found his beloved Moonlight.

Incognito, finally, the Lord Gonji returned to Japan. He did not, as became a dutiful and honorable son, proceed straightway to his home, there to permit the members of his family to celebrate and rejoice over his return.

At last Lord Gonji felt free of the thrall of the ancestors. He was a son of the New Japan, master of his own conscience and deeds. The old strict code set down for men of his class and race he knew was medieval, childish, unworthy of consideration. Hitherto his actions had been governed by the example of the ancestors and by order of those in authority over him. Now he was free—free to choose his own path; and his path led not to the house of his fathers.

It led, instead, to that “hell city” which had been imprinted so vividly upon his mind that even in the heart of Manchuria he had seen its lights and heard its brazen music.

From street to street of the Yoshiwara, and from house to house, now went the Lord Saito Gonji, scanning with eager, feverish eyes every pitiful little inmate thus publicly exhibited in cages. But among the hopeless, apathetic faces that smiled at him with enforced beguilement was not the one he sought.

He turned to other cities, wherever the famous brothels were maintained, leaving fo............