Long into the night Yodogima struggled hard with the problem which now crowded closer round, hemming her in and forcing her down till there seemed no other means of escape. Their own religion promised no relief short of the phenomenal, and her husband had made a last appeal: would again tear himself away, going this time into foreign lands, thus to retrieve his fallen prestige with further deadly conflict.

Something must be done; and that quickly, as circumstances indicated; the recently subdued daimyos, though loyal, were veterans, and out of employment, became unmanageable; using, no doubt, the matter of the taiko’s failure of a natural son as an excuse themselves to break the peace. Korea, therefore, offered a likely outlet, and thither her husband should go, yet it must take many months to equip and move such an army as he had threatened upon so hazardous an undertaking. Yodogima reasoned that she still had time to save him and reestablish confidence at home.

“I shall in truth try the temple,” concluded she, to herself, “as this meddlesome Oyea—I fear with more of knowledge than faith—has so earnestly and Christianly-like advised. Perhaps creed, after all, is verily some real man-made, opportunely-devised opening unto the Way. I must, however, accept faith, as a guide, more upon the strength of Jokoin’s fain attitude; she seems to have gotten for the trouble all she asked or could manage. This Christian device, though new and undemonstrable, if it does no more, may be the means of revealing to me a bit of the benefaction that some of our fathers profess these six hundred years or more to have found hidden behind the benignity of Buddha. Yes, I shall just this once, if not again, set aside staid reason to test dame truth, deny self at the bidding and for the love of others—the effect can be no more trying than the cause is just. My prayer must be answered.”

Thus convinced and resigned, sleep, peaceful and converting, brought in its round at waking a hope that held hitherto only in the making. Now she could look out upon the world with a freedom that brooked no questioning: the very clouds themselves seemed fraught with a charity that she had believed the part and the due of man alone. No longer need she concern herself about sin; the blood of a savior had atoned that: Buddha made it plain that knowledge is the way, and men, inspired no doubt, had built a temple, sacredly ruled at the door.

She had, only, to proceed thither, and pray.

Yodogima really held fast at heart a true conversion; the same ideal shone as brightly as before; only the means had shifted; let them smite; she should turn the other cheek.

And they did strike. Long before Hideyoshi had tried out or finished his advantage, Oyea clandestinely entered the temple and there counselled the keeper—she had known him for a long time, and designed better than he knew or Yodogima anticipated.

The morning wended brightly, and the confiding princess, departing tenderly the vain, mute welcomings of an ardently-inclined, hard-accepted husband, trod expectantly toward the selfsame edifice, devised and made in the name of One who consoles, be it man or his cold-striven image.

Two lions carved in stone stood sentinel at either side the entrance. These Yodogima contemplated in the light of a new understanding, born not of tradition, but of faith proclaimed and knowledge derived. She stood there in the footprints of an enforced progression, and must no longer question dogma, though God be greater. Then she turned toward the gate, frosted with antiquity and jealous of its passage—a receptacle midway standing glaringly reminded her of a duty that fortunately she had remembered: Yodogima, too, cast her bread upon the waters, and passed on, that others might feast as she did penance.

Intercepted now by grated screens, warning her that she must ask and it shall be given, Yodogima looked and there beheld an image, a true likeness of what she all her life had painted sublime. Neither male nor female, but of wood, carved in lines more symmetrical than reality had effected, lacquered of gold finer than the wants of ordinary man had ever acclaimed, these surrounded with safeguards seemingly beyond human invasion, guarded on either side by emblems without either beginning or ending, all surmounted in a halo that two burning pots of incense ceaselessly wafted thither, this Yodogima, a penitent, believed with the spirit of one who would suffer no transgression to stay or hinder any fulfilment that her God might elect, and clapping her hands as inwardly decreed and outwardly expressed through time hoary invoked a passage no less distant or angelic than others perhaps as discerning or more plastic, of ages recurring and lands apart, had sought or denied in the lesser stranding of a course no more divinely conceived.

No further or greater low proving and encouraging of an inspiration born within, and the spit-ball propitiously thrown—not with vulgar meaning—the gates on either side the lofty emblem swung ajar—Yodogima had gained the promise of an inner sanctuary, where moods and morals are the more finely, if not subtly, wrought and there dwells no other god or goddess than communion withal.

Yodogima chose the right approach and her prognosticator the left. As an affinity draws, so it resolves only the transverse of an attending unity. The positive and the negative harmonize upon grounds no more irreducible, and that bonze followed his prey as the quadrant confronts a Cardan.

Lying there, at one side, behind closed doors, his own view unobstructed, this godly man, with the aid of Oyea, a Christian accomplice’s assurances, had penetrated deeper than the veil donned in faith gained and worn as a security provisioned, and discerning the motive augured a fulfilment that Yodogima alone had striven for in vain.

Once inside the four walls of this more than sacred, an over-beautiful, a divinely wrought, and suggestively potent place, our vainly beguiled and no less hard-pressed princess dropped hopelessly to her knees and gazing round saw no other thing than one bewilderingly done round and covering of modestly drawn yet bewitchingly significant prisms or reflections that led apparently to or from nowhere, yet emanating in or symbolizing afar the one ideal that had lured her thither.

“At last!” whispered she, as the sun above gathered and mellowed, merging and intertwining the fanciful and the real, till comprehension ceased and ideality carried her aloft the world she knew.

Only the soft matting underneath served her now prostrate form; the spirit ceased its aching quest: a reality bordering the extremes of ethereal generation possessed her. The great sun seemed marshaling its hosts. Glad bugles sounded. A myriad cupids, winged as doves and armed with bows and arrows, balanced and made ready for the flight. The great father of fathers reached into his mighty knapsack, and Yodogima breathed sparingly lest he withdraw empty the hand she longed to realize filled. The good benefactor smiled, and that she sorrow no more revealed to her the jewel—it was a son. And as the troopers charged earthward, their purpose revealing itself in every fiber, the glad tidings of a fulfilment worthy and complete filling her to overflowing, Yodogima opened wide her eyes, and—Katsutoya stood over her.

Her dream, then, was in truth an unthinkable reality: faith, as designed, a pregnant hoax.

Words were worse than useless now, and the body as helpless; thus Yodogima only stared, the harder: with one furtive glance Katsutoya read her innermost thoughts, and flushing to the full bent his knee with partings still baser:

“Trust me, Yodogima: henceforth I am Harunaga.”

Yodogima did not attempt to answer her traducer, who departed as he had entered, professing the bestowal, only, of mercies latent underneath the sackcloth and of the beadroll. She lay submerged now; overweighted with a fantasy as far beneath the earth she abode as fancy had heretofore carried her above it. Darkness came on, tremors marked some hard internal disturbance, while yawning caverns fumed and spat fiery bursts and sulphurous clouds from the mountain away. The infernal possessed her. A huge dragon, half within, half without, at the summit, coiling and straightening, lifting and lowering, seeking and searching, here and there, all around, to the horizon, at last found her out, and mounting its slender neck, with no hold to retain her balance, the monster, rising with her, curved easily round and, retracing its slimy part, disappeared into the uttermost depths of hades itself.

And there Ono Harunaga sweat and forked at building the fires. Great heaps of humans replenished the fuel bins. These Yodogima scanned with eagerness: many faces seemed familiar, but always before she could come close enough to determine certainly who the victim was, Harunaga had snatched away and pitched him into the flames beyond her reach or discernment. Which eager haste seemed quite unreasonable to her, but upon questioning him he answered resolutely as of old:

“Have faith in—”

Yodogima did not exactly catch the last word in his reply, but she could not believe it “Christ” or “Buddha” or “Confucius,” or any like name that she knew, because the furnace fender were himself a reverend man. No Shinto patron had been named; these were gods: the antithesis of Saviors, hence in fact and not on trust.

Once she thought she saw her father, but upon closer scrutiny discerned this victim’s plight to be in consequence of the vain ambitions of three unfaithful daughters, hence knew that she must have mistaken him. This almost inexcusable blunder shocked her severely, and to avoid any further unpleasantness of that sort Yodogima determined, as she were there, to do as others did; disguise her own true self, and rely wholly upon deception to carry her forward thence in the quest of all things hellish. Therefore she began ignoring the individual, and continued considering altogether the classes; and as there appeared to be only one such there, she hit upon the plan of segregating Harunaga’s vast unrealized mass of strident humans by considering more their color. And here, too, distinguishment proved difficult, though there appeared to be, distinctly, some awful difference in the flame if white fuel were added, or the reverse. The former flared more fiercely, burned the less willingly, and their screams—

Rising to her feet and looking round at the barren walls yet enclosing her, Yodogima realized for the first time that what we think we see is but the shadow of an energy stupidly awaiting over there the magic wand here to unfold.

Intelligence had wrought a true womanhood.

But invoke it, and the world itself were a fairyland—let gods be gods and the rest each his allotted part endure. She would live down the sin of beguiling, and bring to earth with ambition’s might the heaven she had fancied above.