A few hours later Hana came into her bedroom, and, lighting her lantern, tossed her fan into a chair. The room was empty, for her attendant had had a vertigo at the suggestion that she should accompany her mistress into the desert, and had been sent back to Snow Country to await Hana's return. She had left during the day, to take most of the heavy luggage with her.
Hana stood in the middle of the room and looked at the preparations for the early start next morning with a little smile of satisfaction. Everything was prepared; the final arrangements had all been made some days before. The camel caravan with the camp equipment was due to leave the capital a few hours before the time fixed for the Inuzukas to start with Akatsuchi, the known guide whom the government authorities had reluctantly recommended. The two big suit-cases that Hana was taking with her stood open, ready packed, waiting only for the last few necessities, and by them the steamer trunk that Sir Kiba would take charge of and leave in Snow Country as he passed through. On a reclining chair was laid out her riding kit ready for the morning. Her smile broadened as she looked at the smart-cut breeches and high brown boots. They were the clothes in which most of her life had been spent, and in which she was far more at home than in the pretty dresses over which she had laughed with Shino.
She was glad the dance was over; it was not a form of exercise that appealed to her particularly. She was thinking only of the coming tour. She stretched her arms out with a little happy laugh.
"It's the life of lives, and it's going to begin all over again tomorrow morning." She crossed over to the dressing-table, and, propping her elbows on it, looked at herself in the mirror, with a little friendly smile at the reflection. When no one is around to talk to, she usually talks to herself, with no thought for the beauty of the face staring back at her from the glass. The only comment she ever made to herself on her own appearance was sometimes to wish that her hair was not such a boring shade. She looked at herself now with a tinge of curiosity. "I wonder why I'm so especially happy tonight. It must be because we have been so long in Iwagakure. It's been very jolly, but I was beginning to get very bored." She laughed again and picked up her watch to check on the time. It was one of her peculiarities that she would wear no jewellery of any kind. Even the gold repeater (a watch or clock with a striking mechanism that upon pressure of a spring will indicate the time in hours or quarters and sometimes minutes) in her hand was on a plain leather strap. She undressed slowly and each moment felt more wide-awake. Slipping a thin wrap over her pyjamas, she went out on to the broad balcony on to which her bedroom gave. The room was on the first floor, and opposite her window rose one of the ornately carved and bracketed pillars that supported the balcony, stretching up to the second story above her head. She looked down into the gardens below. It was an easy climb, she thought, with a boyish grin—far easier than many she had achieved successfully when the need to explore aimlessly became an urge that needed to be satisfied. But the West was not convenient for solitary wandering; native servants had a disturbing habit of lying down to sleep wherever drowsiness overcame them, and it was not very long since she had slid down from her balcony and landed exactly on a sleeping bundle of a person who had awaken half the hotel with his howls. She leant far over the rail, trying to see into the verandah below, and she thought she caught a glimpse of white drapery. She looked again, and this time there was nothing, but she shook her head with a little grimace, and swung herself up on to the broad ledge of the railing. Settling herself comfortably with her back against the column she looked out over the hotel gardens into the night, humming softly the Haku song she had heard earlier in the evening.
The risen moon was full, and its cold, brilliant light filled the garden with strong black shadows. She watched some that seemed even to move, as if the garden were alive with creeping, hurrying figures, and amused herself tracking them until she traced them to the palm tree or cactus bush that caused them. One in particular gave her a long hunt till she finally ran it to its lair, and it proved to be the shadow of a grotesque statue half hidden by a flowering shrub. Forgetting the hour and the open windows all around her, she burst into a rippling peal of laughter, which was interrupted by the appearance of a figure, imperfectly seen through a framework of crossed woods which divided her balcony from the next one, and the sound of an irritable voice.
"For Heaven's sake, Hana, let other people sleep if you can't."
"Which, being interpreted, is let Sir Kiba Inuzuka sleep," she retorted, with a chuckle. "My dear boy, sleep if you want to, but I don't know how you can on a night like this. Did you ever see such a gorgeous moon?"
"Oh, damn the moon!"
"Oh, very well. Don't get cross about it. Go back to bed and put your head under the clothes, and then you won't see it. But I'm going to sit here."
"Hana, don't be an idiot! You'll go to sleep and fall into the garden and break your neck."
"Tant pis pour moi. Tant mieux pour toi," (I'd like to write it in English but let's keep it to imply shes a linguist as she travels a lot 😉) she said humorously. "I have left you all that I have in the world, dear brother. Could devotion go further?"
She paid no heed to his expression of annoyance, and looked back into the garden. It was a wonderful night, silent except for the cicadas' monotonous chirping, mysterious with the inexplicable mystery that hangs always in the Occidental night. The smells of the West rose up all around her; here, as at home, they seemed more discernible by night than by day. Often at home she had stood on the little stone balcony outside her room, drinking in the smells of the night—the pungent, earthy smell after rain, the aromatic smell of pine trees near the house. It was the intoxicating smells of the night that had first driven her, as a very small child, to climb down from her balcony, clinging to the thick ivy roots, to wander with the delightful sense of breaking the norms through the moonlit park and even into the bordering gloomy woods. She had always been utterly fearless.