3

      One warm spring day he sat looking out over the garden. Mallards were swimming about on the pond, wing to wing, chattering happily to each other. It was a sight which in earlier years would scarcely have caught the prince's eye, but now he felt something like jealousy toward these mindless creatures, each steadfast to its mate.

He had the girls go over a music lesson, and very appealing they were too, as they bent their small figures to the work. The sound of the instruments was enough to bring tears to his eyes. Softly, he recited a verse, brushing away a tear as he did so.

“She has left behind her mate, and these nestlings too.

Why have they lingered in this uncertain world?”

He was an extremely handsome man. Emaciation from years of absti-nence only added to the courtliness of his bearing. He had put on a figured robe for the music lesson. Somewhat rumpled, casually thrown over his shoulders, it seemed to emphasize by its very carelessness the nobility of the wearer.

Oigimi,+ the older girl, quietly took out an inkstone and seemed about to write a few lines on it.

“Come now. You know better than to write on an inkstone.” * He pushed a sheet of paper towards her.

“I know now, as I see it leave the nest,

How uncertain is the lot of the waterfowl.”

It was not a masterpiece, but in the circumstances it was very touching. The hand showed promise even though the characters were separated one from another in a still childish fashion.

“And now it is your turn,” he said to Nakanokimi,+ the younger.

More of a child than her sister, she took longer with her verse:

“Unsheltered by the wing of the grieving father,

The nestling would surely have perished in the nest.”

It saddened him to see the princesses, their robes shabby and wrin-kled, no one to take care of them, bored and without hope of relief from boredom—but they were utterly charming on such occasions, each in her own way. He read from the holy text in his hand, sometimes interrupting with a poem. To the older girl he had taught the lute, to the younger the thirteen-stringed koto. When they played duets, of which they were fond, he thought them very satisfactory pupils, if still somewhat immature.