4

“I would doubtless lose my way if I tried to go home,” Yu~giri con-tinued unconcernedly. “Perhaps there are rooms for me somewhere here-abouts? This one here by your curtains—may I ask you to let me have the use of it? I must see His Reverence. He should be finishing his prayers very shortly.”

She was most upset. This insistent playfulness was not like him. She did not want to offend him, however, by withdrawing pointedly to the sickroom. He continued his efforts to coax her from her silence, and when a woman went in with a message he followed after.

It was still daylight, but the mists were heavy and the inner rooms were dark. The woman was horrified at having thus become his guide. The princess, sensing danger, sought to make her escape through the north door, to which, with sure instinct, he made his way. She had gone on into the next room, but her skirts trailed behind, making it impossible for her to bar the door. Drenched in perspiration, she sat trembling in the halfopen door. Her women could not think what to do. It would not have been impossible to bar the door from the near side, but that would have meant dragging him away by main force, and one did not lay hands upon such a man. h “Sir, sir. We would not have dreamed that you could even think of such a thing.”

“Is it so dreadful that I am here beside her? I may not be the most desirable man in the world—indeed I am as aware as anyone that I am far from it.” He spoke slowly and with quiet emphasis. “But after all this time she can scarcely call me a stranger.”

She was not prepared to listen. He had taken advantage of her, and there was nothing she wished to say.

“You are behaving like a selfish child. My crime has been to have feelings which I have kept to myself but which I cannot control. I promise you that I will do nothing without your permission. You have shattered my heart, and am I to believe that you do not know it? I am here because you have kept me at a distance and maintained this impossible pretense of ignorance—because I have had no alternative. I have risked being thought a boorish upstart because my sorrows would mean nothing if you did not know of them. Your coldness could make me angry, but I respect your position too much to speak of it.

It would have been easy to force the door open, but that would have destroyed the impression of solemn sincerity which he had been at such pains to create. “How touching,” he said, laughing. “This thin little line between us seems to mean so much to you.” She was a sweet, gentle lady, in spite of everything. Perhaps it was her worries that made her seem so tiny and fragile. Her sleeves, pleasantly soft and rumpled—for she had not been expecting guests—gave off a friendly sort of perfume, and indeed everything about her was gently, quietly pleasing. In upon a sighing wind came the sounds of the mountain night, a humming of insects, the call of a stag, the rushing of a waterfall. It was a scene that would have made the most sluggish and insensitive person postpone his rest. As the moon came over the mountain ridge he was almost in tears.

“If you wish your silence to suggest unplumbed depths you may be assured that it is having the opposite effect. You do not seem to know that m utterly harmless, and so without pretense that I am easily made a victim of. People who feel free to deal in rumors laugh mightily at me. Are you one of them? If so, I really must beg your leave to be angry. You cannot pretend not to know about these things.” She was wretched, hating especially the hints that her experience should direct her towards easy acceptance. She had been very unlucky, and she wished she might simply vanish away.

“I am sure I have been guilty of errors in judgment, but nothing has prepared me for this.” Her voice, very soft, seemed on the edge of tears.

“Weeping and weeping, paraded before the world,

The one and only model of haplessness?” She spoke hesitantly, as if to herself. He repeated the poem in a whisper. She wished she had kept it to herself.

“I am sorry. I should not have said it.

“Had I not come inspiring all these tears,

The world would not have noticed your misfortunes?

“Come, now.” She sensed that he was smiling. “A show of resolve is what is called for.” He tried to coax her out into the moonlight, but she held stubbornly back. He had no trouble taking her in his arms.

“Cannot this evidence of my feeling persuade you to be a little more companionable? But you may be assured that I shall do nothing without your permission.” Dawn was approaching. The mists had lifted and moonlight flooded the room, finding the shallow eaves of the west veranda scarcely a hindrance at all. She tried to hide her face and he thought her charming. He spoke briefly of Kashiwagi. Quietly, politely, he reproved her for holding him so much the inferior of his dead friend.

She was as a matter of fact comparing them. Although Kashiwagi had still been a minor and rather obscure official, everyone had seemed in favor of the marriage and she too had come to accept it; and once they were married he had shown that astonishing indifference. Now came scandalous insinuations on the part of a man who was as good as one of the family. How would they appear to her father-in-law—and to the world in general —and to her own royal father? It was too awful. She might fight him off with her last ounce of strength, but the world was not likely to give her much credit. And to keep her mother in ignorance seemed a very grave delinquency indeed. What a dunce her mother would think her when presently she learned of it all!

“Do please leave before daylight.” She had nothing more to say to him.

“This is very odd. You know the interpretation which the dews are likely to put upon a departure at this hour. You shall have your way all the same; but please remember this: I have let you see what a fool I am, and if you gloat over what you have done I shall not hold myself responsible for the extremes I may be driven to.”

He was feeling very inadequate to the situation and would have liked to persist further; but for all his inexperience he knew that he would regret having forced himself upon her. For her sake and for his own he made his way out under the cover of the morning mists.

“Wet by dew-laden reeds beneath your eaves,

I now push forth into the eightfold mists?

“And do you think that your own sleeves will be dry?* You must pay for your arbitrary ways.”

Though she could do little about rumors, she was determined not to face the reproaches of her own conscience.

“I think I have not heard the likes of it,” she replied, more icily than before.

“Because these dewy grasses wet your sleeves

I too shall have wet sleeves—is that your meaning?”

She was delightful. He felt sorry for her and ashamed of himself, that having so distinguished himself in her service and her mother's he should suddenly take advantage of her and propose a rather different sort of relationship. Yet he would look very silly if he were to bow and withdraw.