29

Ukifune saw doom approaching. Niou wrote asking over and over again to be kept abreast of the preparations, and pleading the unhappiness of “waiting, as the moss beneath the pines.” * Doom seemed to come yet a few steps closer. One or the other of the two men was certain to be made desperately unhappy, and the obvious solution was for her to disappear. Long ago there had been a maiden who drowned herself for no greater cause than that two men seemed equally fond of her.+ Why should she have regrets for a world that promised only torment? Her mother would grieve for a time; but she had all those other children and would presently gather grasses of forgetfulness. Death would bring less lingering sorrow than disgrace. Ukifune was on the surface a gentle, docile, obedient girl, but perhaps because she had been reared on the outer edges of society, she was capable of sudden, impulsive action. Unobtrusively, she began tearing up suggestive papers, burning them in her lamp and sending the ashes down the river. Women not in her confidence assumed that she was destroying fugitive notes written to beguile the tedium and not worth taking to the city.

But Jiju~ too saw what was happening. “My lady! Whatever are you doing? I can understand not wanting people to see your little love notes, but the day will come when you will regret burning them. The thing to do—they all do it, princesses and servants too—is put them away in a corner of some box and take them out from time to time. He does express himself so beautifully, and his letters even _look_ beautiful. How can you be so heartless?”

“Heartless? I do not have long to live, I'm afraid, and I wouldn't want to leave them behind. For his sake, really. Think what people would say. She wanted us to know all about it—that's what they would say.”

She remembered having heard, back before she knew much of the world, that to die in advance of one's parents is a grave sin—but she had reached something like a decision, and, so paralyzing were the thoughts that trailed one another through her mind, she feared she would not have the strength to reach another.