24

Already it was dawn, and he would have said, if asked, that the sun had only just set. His fear of gossip had much less to do with his own good name than with concern for hers. The cause of her indisposition was by now clear enough. She had tried to hide the belt that was the mark of pregnancy. He had respected her shyness, and said nothing. A stupid sort of reticence—and on the other hand any show of forwardness would have gone against his deeper wishes. To surrender to the impulse of a moment would have been to make future meetings more difficult; to demand secret meetings, whatever her wishes, would have been to complicate his own life infinitely and to leave her in the cruelest uncertainty. Would it be better not to see her at all? But the briefest interval away from her was torment. He had to see her. And so, in the end, the workings of his wayward heart prevailed.

Though her face was somewhat thinner, her delicate beauty was as always. It was with him after his departure, driving everything else from his thoughts. He debated the possibility of taking her to Uji, but it was not likely that Niou would agree, and it would be most unwise to go in secret. How could he follow her wishes and the mandates of decorum at the same time? He lay sunk in thought.

Very early in the morning he got off a note, folded into a formal envelope:

“An autumn sky, to remind me of days of old:

I made my way in vain down a dew-drenched path. Your cruelty is, I should say, both intolerable and senseless.”

She did not want to answer, but knew that her women noticed any departure from routine. “I have received your letter,” she said briefly, “and, not at all well, am not up to a reply.”

It offered little consolation to its recipient, still haunted by the events of the evening before. She had been dismayed by his behavior, for she had little way of guessing what another man might have done; and yet she had sent him off with composure and dignity and no suggestion of rudeness. The memory was not comforting. He could tell himself that he had been exposed to all the varieties and stages of loneliness.

She had improved enormously since the Uji days. If Niou were to reject her, then he himself would be her support. They could not meet openly, perhaps, but she would be his heart's refuge. A reprehensible heart, that it should have room for only this—but such are the shortcomings one finds in men of apparent depth and discernment. He had grieved for Oigimi, and Iris present sufferings seemed far worse.

Thus the thoughts came and went. Upon hearing that Niou had put in an appearance at the Nijo~ house, he quite forgot, in Iris jealousy, that he had set himself up as her guardian.