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      The Uji house was in chaos. Ukifune had disappeared, and frantic searching had revealed no trace of her. I need not seek to describe the confusion, for my readers will remember old romances that tell of maidens abducted in the night, and of how it was the next morning.

Her first messenger having failed to return, Ukifune's mother sent a second. “I left the city while the cocks were still crowing,” he said.

Nurse and the other women made no sense. They had no notion what might have happened, and they moved in utter confusion from one possi-bility to the next. Ukon and Jiju~, the only two among them who had known of the crisis, remembered their lady's growing moodiness and feared she might have thrown herself into the river. In tears, they opened the mother's letter.

“My worries have left me quite unable to sleep, and so I suppose I shall not see you tonight even in my dreams. Nightmares, rather; night-mares dominate my life and have driven me to distraction. I am very, very worried and am going to send for you, even though you are so shortly to move to the city. Today, of course, we are likely to have rain.”

Ukon opened the girl's note to her mother and soon was sobbing helplessly. It had happened. There could be no other explanation for so sad a little poem. And why had she not given Ukon even a hint of it all? They had been such friends since they were little girls. Ukon had not been separated from her for a moment, had not kept the tiniest mote of a secret from her. Why, at the most important time of all, had she given no indication of what was coming? It was too much. Ukon wept like a thwarted child.

They had known that the girl was despondent, but they had not thought her capable of such extraordinary, such frightening resolve. But how, exactly, had she committed the dreadful act?

Nurse was less help than any of them. “What shall we do, what _shall_ we do?” she asked over and over again.