Of course, there was much talk about the East; but it was a different
point of view, from that of the enthusiasts of Deauville and the
Riviera. These men and women had many of them lived in India, the
Malay States, Japan, or the open ports of China, lived there to earn
their bread and butter, not to dream about the Magic of the Orient.
For such as these the romance had faded. The pages of their busy lives
were written within a mourning border of discontent, of longing for
that home land, to which on the occasion of their rare holidays they
returned so readily, and which seemed to have no particular place or
use for them when they did return. They were members of the British
Dispersion; but their Zion was of more comfort to them as a sweet
memory than as an actual home.

"Yes," they would say about the land of their exile, "it is very
picturesque."

But their faces, lined or pale, their bitterness and their reticence,
told of years of strain, laboriously money-earning, in lands where
relaxations are few and forced, where climatic conditions are adverse,
where fevers lurk, and where the white minority are posted like
soldiers in a lonely fort, ever suspicious, ever on the watch.

* * * * *

The most faithful of Asako's bodyguard was a countryman of her own,
Viscount Kamimura, the son of a celebrated Japanese statesman and
diplomat, who, after completing his course at Cambridge, was returning
to his own country for the first time after many years.