altogether and her ill-shapen high-heeled boots replaced by airy
slippers of braided fiber.

Her rather short stature and her hair--which fortunately enough was
black--served to lessen her conspicuousness, especially when dressed
in the fashion followed by Japanese girls; and with the leaving off
of the use of cosmetics and the spending of several hours a day in
the flower garden even her pallid complexion suffered rapid change.

It was about a fortnight before Professor Oshima returned from
Tokio. Upon his arrival Ethel at once pleaded with him to be sent to
America, but the scientist slowly shook his head.

"It is too late," he said; "there is going to be a war."

Thus it happened that Ethel Calvert was retained in the Professor's
family as a sort of English tutor to his children, and introduced as
a relative of his wife, and no one suspected that she was one of the
hated Americans.

* * *

The trouble between Japan and the United States dated back to the
early part of the century. It was deep-seated and bitter, and was
not only the culmination of a rivalry between the leading nations of
the great races of mankind, but a rivalry between two great ideas or
policies that grew out in opposite directions from the age of
unprecedented mechanical and scientific progress that marked the
dawn of the twentieth century.