nothing.

Yoritomo's sister, O'Kami San (that is to say: the honorable Miss Kami),
spoke a very little English. This fact she had bashfully hidden from the
girls on the occasion of their first meeting. But when Billie, through
Yoritomo, asked his sister to walk in the garden, she answered herself:

"Receive thanks. Honorable walk will confer pleasure."

Assuredly the Japanese-English dictionaries and phrase books must all use
the most stilted and ceremonious English words, so Billie thought.

"'Receive thanks and confer pleasure!' How absurd!"

But then Billie did not realize that the Japanese language abounds in
such ceremonious words and high-sounding phrases and, in order to keep
the spirit of the original, translations are generally literal.

Off they trooped down a garden path, followed by the reproachful eyes of
Miss Helen Campbell, who found it a decided strain on the nerves to keep
a second-hand conversation going. Nancy lingered behind and helped her
out by giving Yoritomo an account of their accident on Arakawa Ridge.
This he immediately passed on to his mother and aunt.

In the meantime, O'Kami San, trotting along beside Billie, with Mary and
Elinor following behind, might have just stepped out of a Japanese fan.
She was so entirely unreal and cunning that the girls had no eyes for the
rosy rain of cherry blossoms dropping from the trees, nor the lovely
vista of garden with its flaming bushes of azaleas and cool green clumps
of ferns. Out of compliment to the season O'Kami San wore a robe of