Free The Japanese Lantern by Isobel Chace Page A

squash everything that she had to do into them. Alexander had put off his bedtime to the last possible moment and it came as rather a shock to her to find that she had only allowed herself half an hour to get ready, before Edward was due to fetch her.
    The bathroom was through the living room from her room and she scurried through it in her dressing-gown straight into Jason’s arms.
    “Going out?” he asked.
    “Yes. I’m late now,” she said breathlessly.
    He looked as though he was going to say something, but then he changed his mind and stood aside for her.
    “Have a good time,” he said.
    The bath was a Japanese one that one sat in rather than lay in, filled with boiling hot water and scented lavishly. Jonquil hurried all she could, but the temperature was too hot for her to do more than put one toe in, and, as it was filled by hand, she didn’t want to ask for any cold water to cool it off.
    At last, however, she was ready, just as Edward’s car slid up to the front door.
    “Shall I let him in?” Jason asked her. There was a slightly sardonic note in his voice that she did her best to ignore.
    “I’ll go straight out,” she said. “I think he expected to be a little earlier.”
    Jason shrugged his shoulders.
    “If you’re last in, don’t forget to lock up,” he reminded her.
    Now what in the world was there for her to take exception to in that? She looked up at him quickly to see what he was really thinking, but his eyes were veiled. He threw himself down into a chair, picked up the book he was reading and began to look through the pages for his place.
    Edward looked very suave and Western in his dinner jacket and she wondered again what it could possibly have been that she had disliked about him in Manila. He opened the door of the car for her and smiled as she pulled her skirt out of his way.
    “You look very charming,” he told her, as he got in beside her.
    “Why, thank you,” she said.
    It was nice to know he thought so. And he did really think so, she knew, by the intangible something in his eyes when he looked at her.
    “I had an awful race to get ready,” she laughed, and told him about her adventures with the bath.
    “I was glad you could come,” he smiled. “Unfortunately I have to go to Kyoto tomorrow and I don't know exactly when I shall be back. The snags of not being one’s own master ! ”
    “Oh.” She was immensely sorry. It was ridiculous that his presence in Tokyo should mean anything to her, but it had been comforting to know that he was there. She thought it was his kin dness in telephoning her that first evening, when everything had been so strange.
    “I shall miss you,” she said at last.
    He smiled at that.
    “Will you? I’m very flattered. But perhaps we shall meet there. You never know. The great Mr. Tate has a house there, I believe, and Kyoto is Yoshiko’s home town.”
    “I hope so. Is it really so much more lovely than Tokyo?”
    He gave her rather an odd look of amusement mixed with enquiry.
    “I’ll tell you when I get back,” he said. “Like you, this is my first visit to Japan. I thought you knew that?”
    She remembered now that she had been told that. It must be the confidence with which he found his way around that had made her forget, about it.
    “You must have travelled a great deal, though,” she said. “You seem quite at home here, not in the least uncertain as I am. Yesterday I travelled on my first bus, and I was terrified that I wouldn’t get out at the right place.”
    She thought he seemed pleased, for he grinned and said:
    “Girls should always be a little uncertain. It makes it so much easier for us men to be properly protective.”
    Edward drove well, she thought. The traffic might well have flustered a lesser man, especially the cheaper rated taxis that pushed through unbelievably narrow spaces, intimidating the private drivers as they went.
    “Are we going far?” she asked.
    Edward shook his head.
    “I thought we’d dine at