The Japanese Lantern Read Online Free Page A

passengers as fast as they were able.
    At last, they were deposited outside the impressive portals of the Manila Hotel and they paused a moment, with their night-stop bags at their feet, to catch their breath.
    “I wonder what they would think of them at home?” Jonquil said out loud, almost sorry to see the last of their unconventional transport.
    “They would laugh, calm them down, and finally make them quite respectable,” Jason hazarded. “We have more pity for our police!”
    Inside the hotel it was beautifully cool. It had a pleasant tropical air that appealed to Jonquil and was infinitely more comfortable than any of the places she had stayed in in Australia. Within seconds she had been given her key and a porter was waiting to escort her to her room.
    “I’ll meet you in the bar when you’re ready,” Jason told her, and she nodded gaily as the lift gates clicked to a close and they disappeared upwards to another floor.
    “Where do I find the bar?” she asked the porter. The size of the hotel she found secretly a little frightening. Her family had always used a small though comfortable hotel in Sydney, and elsewhere the hotel system of Australia had been hardly more than a series of uncomfortable houses where few people ever ventured actually to stay.
    The porter, however, was apparently quite accustomed to being asked such questions, for he gave her a very kindly smile and said:
    “It is directly opposite where you came in, Madame. The Jungle Bar.”
    That sounded exciting, and Jonquil hurried through her brief unpacking to get downstairs again.
    Neither was she disappointed. For Jungle Bar was no misnomer; there was jungle indeed, growing wherever one looked, in wonderful profusion. Indeed, so busy was she admiring the plants that it was some seconds before she saw Jason, and only then did she realize that he had been quietly watching her all the time.
    “What will you have to drink?” he asked her, his eyes alight with amusement.
    She told him, her eyes still a little dreamy and distant. It was so incredible to realize that only the day before she had still been at home on her parents cattle station, and now here she was a very, very long way from home, amidst surroundings she had not dreamed existed.
    “You look as though you’ve just arrived by magic carpet,” Jason teased her.
    “I feel a little that way!” Jonquil admitted, smiling. “I’ve never been outside Australia before.”
    He raised one eyebrow at her and grinned.
    “It makes you a very delightful companion,” he teased her. “I feel like the uncle showing Ali Baba the wonders of his cave.”
    The afternoon passed in a golden whirl. They walked the streets, laughing at one another’s jokes, past the bombed-out Spanish Cathedral and into the narrower streets, where the old women sat, their shawls wound round them, with their wares set out to attract the passers by. They stood beside the river and gazed down at the little boats, and, last of all, they took a ride in a “calesa ”, a spindly, two-passenger buggy drawn by a horse.
    “Oh, I’m sorry it’s all over ! ” Jonquil sighed when they found themselves back at their hotel. “I could have gone on for ever.”
    “But it’s not over yet,” he protested. “We ’ re going out to dinner.”
    “But it ’ s late,” she reminded him. “ I mean to dine out without dressing.”
    She cast her mind’s eye over her dresses, wondering if any of them would do for such a treat.
    “They don’t keep Australian hours here. It’s still wonderfully early in Manila,” he reassured her.
    Jonquil needed no further persuasion. The strange smells and the polyglot people pulled her back outside. She had completely fallen in love with the Filipinos.
    Jason was mysterious as to where he was taking her. She had learned during the afternoon that he knew the city well, speaking excellent Spanish and even getting along in the Tagalog dialect, left behind in Manila by a people long since