20

Looking in on his daughter that same day, prince Hyo~bu found the house vaster and more cavernous than he had remembered it, and the decay astonishingly advanced since the grandmother's death.

“How can you bear it for even a moment? You must come and live with me. I have plenty of room. And Nurse here can have a room of her own. There are other little girls, and I am sure you will get on beautifully together.” Genji's perfume had been transferred to the child. “What a beautiful smell. But see how rumpled and ragged you are. I did not like the idea of having you with an ailing lady and wanted you to come and live with me. But you held back so, and I have to admit that the lady who is to be your mother has not been happy at the idea herself. It seems very sad that we should have waited for this to happen.”

“Please, my lord. We may be lonely, but it will be better for us to remain as we are at least for a time. It will be better for us to wait until she is a little older and understands things better. She grieves for her grandmother and quite refuses to eat.”

She was indeed thinner, but more graceful and elegant.

“Why must she go on grieving? Her grandmother is gone, and that is that. She still has me.” It was growing dark. The girl wept to see him go, and he too was in tears. “You mustn't be sad. Please. You mustn't be sad. I will send for you tomorrow at the very latest.”

She was inconsolable when he had gone, and beyond thinking about her own future. She was old enough to know what it meant, that the lady who had never left her was now gone. Her playmates no longer interested her. She somehow got through the daylight hours, but in the evening she gave herself up to tears, and Sho~nagon and the others wept at their inability to comfort her. How, they asked one another, could they possibly go on?