20

Dawn was near. Sleepless, they were alone with their separate thoughts. He was as always in a rush to get off a letter, even before the morning mists had lifted. Disgusting, thought she, though she did not this time try to take it from him. It was a long letter, and when he had finished he read certain favored passages over to himself, softly but quite audibly.

“It falls from above.#

“Waking from the dream of an endless night

You said—and when may I pay my visit?”

“And what am I to do?” he added in a whisper as he folded it into an envelope and sent for a messenger.

She would have liked to know what else was in it and hoped that she might have a glimpse of the reply. It was all most unsettling.

The sun was high when the reply came. On paper of a dark purple, it was as usual from Kosho~sho~, and, as usual, short and businesslike.

“She made a few notes at the end of your letter. Feeling a little sorry for you and thinking them better than nothing, I gathered them and herewith smuggle them to you.”

So the princess had seen his letter! His delight was perhaps a little too open. There were indeed scraps of paper, fragmentary and disconnected, some of which he reassembled into a poem:

“Morning and night, laments sound over Mount Ono

And Silent Waterfall—a flow of tears?”

There were also fragments from the anthologies, in a very good hand.

He had always thought that there was something wrong with a man who could lose his senses over a woman, and here he was doing it himself. How strange it was, and how extremely painful. He tried to shake himself back into sanity, but without success.