13

To~ no Chu~jo~ now became chancellor and Yu~giri was promoted to middle councillor. He so shone+ with youthful good looks when he went to thank the emperor that To~ no Chu~jo~ was coming to think Kumoinokari, away from the cruel competition at court, the most fortunate of his daughters.

Yu~giri had not forgotten her nurse's scorn for his blue sleeves. One day he handed the nurse a chrysanthemum delicately tinged by frost.

“Did you suspect by so much as a mist of dew

That the azure bloom would one day be a deep purple?

“I have not forgotten,” he added with a bright, winning smile.

She was both pleased and confused.

“What mist of dew could possibly fail to find it,

Though pale its hue, in so eminent a garden?”

She was now behaving, one might almost have said, like his mother-in-law.