39

Late in the night there came a soft knocking at the gate. “Someone from Uji,” it was announced. One of Kaoru's men, thought the nun, ordering the gate opened. She was startled to see a carriage being pulled in.

“Show us to the nun,” said a man who announced himself as the superintendent of Kaoru's Uji manor. She went to the door. A gentle rain

was falling and a remarkable fragrance came in on the cool breeze to tell them who in fact their visitor was, so stately a visitor that he both delighted and upset them. The cottage was a poor one and he had caught them unprepared. What could it possibly mean? they asked one another, bustling about to receive him.

“May I perhaps speak to the lady in private?” he sent in. “I should like to tell her of certain feelings I have scarcely been able to keep to myself these last months.”

The girl was perplexed for an answer.

“He's here, and there's nothing you can do about it,” said her nurse impatiently. “You can at least ask him to sit down. We can have someone slip out and tell your mother. She's so near.”

“Don't be silly—there's no need to tell her,” said the nun. “A couple of young people want to speak to each other, and you assume they're going to fall in love on the spot? He is a quiet, thoughtful young man, not at all the sort to force himself on a lady.”

It was raining harder. The watchmen on their rounds called out in strange East Country accents. “That spot over by the southeast corner, you have to keep an eye on it. Get that wagon inside and close the gate. They don't have common sense, these people.”

It was all very strange and rather forbidding. Seated at the edge of a veranda as of a rustic cottage, he whispered to himself:

“And there is no shelter at Sano.*

“Are there tangles of grass to hold me back, that I wait

So long in the rain at the eaves of your eastern cottage?” +

No doubt the perfume that came in on the breeze was a source of great wonderment to the eastern rustics.

Concluding at length that it would be impossible to turn him away, the girl had a cushion set out in the south room. Urged on by her women she slid the door* open a crack.

“I am not used to looking at doors and I resent even the carpenter+ who makes them.” And he pushed his way inside.

He did not mean, it would seem, to describe his thoughts about having her as a substitute for her sister. “You will not have been aware of it, I am sure, but I once had a glimpse of you through a crack in a door. You have been very much on my mind ever since. I suppose it was meant to be, but you have been so much on my mind that I find it a little odd.”

Small and pretty, very much in control of herself, she quite lived up to his expectations. Indeed, he was delighted with her.