36

Below the veranda autumn grasses beckoned, their plumes bending and swaying over beds of withered flowers. Some, not yet headed, fragile in the evening breeze, were flecked with dew. It was an ordinary enough breeze, and yet it was strangely moving.

“The autumn grass is keeping something back.

Beneath the dew, it beckons and it beckons.” +

He had on an informal robe over a pleasantly rumpled singlet. Taking up a lute, he tuned it to the _o~jiki_ mode. It was so charming a performance that Nakanokimi, who knew a great deal about music, could not go on being annoyed. She was a charming figure herself. Leaning against an armrest, she peeped shyly out from behind a low curtain.

“Weakly, weakly the wind glides over the grasses.

One knows that the moor is at the end of autumn.”

To her poem she added only the words: “Left alone.” *

Embarrassed at her inability to hold back tears, she hid her face behind a fan. She was a delight, and he pitied her; and at the same time he could see that precisely this appeal would make it difficult for other men to stay away. His doubts came back, and his resentment.

The chrysanthemums had not yet taken on their last color, for the more carefully cultivated the chrysanthemum, the slower it is to change. Yet a single blossom, for whatever reason, had changed to that most beautiful of colors. The prince had it brought to him.

“'I do not love, among flowers, the chrysanthemum only,'“+ he whis-pered. “One evening long ago, a certain prince was admiring chrysanthe-mums, and a spirit came down from the heavens to help him at his lute.# We must resign ourselves to doing without such services in this inferior age of ours.”

“We may not be as imaginative as they were,” said Nakanokimi, not wanting him to put the instrument down, and always eager to add to her own repertoire, “but that hardly means that we are not up to playing what has been given to us.”

“I get lonesome, all by myself. You must join me.” He had a koto brought out for her.

But she quite refused to touch it. “I did once have a few lessons, but I'm afraid I wasn't as diligent as I might have been.”

“How difficult you are, my dear, even with these little trifles. The lady at Rokujo~ is still almost a stranger, but she does not try to hide her weaknesses from me. Our good friend Kaoru gives it as his view that women should be docile and straightforward. No doubt you are more open with him.”

And so, finally, he had said it. She sighed and played a brief melody. The strings being somewhat slack, she tuned her koto to the _banjiki_ mode.** Even the few notes she plucked by way of tuning made it clear that her touch was excellent. Niou sang “The Sea of Ise” ++ in very good voice, and Nakanokimi's women, wreathed in smiles, came up close behind the curtains.

“Yes, it would be nice if he could make do with only our lady, but fine gentlemen are what they are. We have to live with it, and I say she's been lucky. Can she really think of running back to those awful mountains? Why, years could go by without anything half as interesting as this.”