THE ancestral home of the Saitos was situated in the most aristocratic of the suburbs of Kioto. Walled in on all sides by the evergreen hills and mountains and sharing in eminence and beauty the most famous of the temples, the shiro should have proved an ideal retreat for the saddened female relatives of the Lord Saito Gonji.

Here, with their household reduced to a single man and maid, and themselves performing menial tasks the more to chasten their spirits, as had become the custom during this period among the nobility, the mother and the wife of Saito Gonji lived silently together. For even the father of Gonji had heard the stern voice of Hachiman, the god of war, and had taken up arms dutifully in his Emperor’s defense.

No longer was the harsh, sarcastic tongue of the Lady Saito Ichigo heard in insistent berating of maid and daughter-in-law; nor did the loud, mirthless laughter of Ohano ring out. Mute, their white faces marked with the shadow of a fear that fairly ate at their hearts’ core, the two Saito women plodded along daily together.

For a time, after the going of Gonji, the older woman had waited upon the younger; but as the days and weeks passed her solicitude for the health of the young wife slowly diminished, and in its place came a scorching anxiety to torture the now aging woman.

Not in the sneering tone she had turned upon the hapless Moonlight, but with the deepest earnestness, she now besought her daughter-in-law daily to lavish costly offerings at the shrines, and even to drink of the Kiyomidzu springs! As became a dutiful daughter, the once smiling, taunting Ohano joined that same melancholy group where once the unhappy Moonlight had been a familiar figure.

Thus the tragic months passed away. Few if any words now passed between the Saito women. A wall seemed to have arisen between them. Where previously the older woman had felt for Ohano an affection almost equivalent to that of a mother, she now turned wearily from the girl’s timid effort to appease her. Unlike, however, her treatment of the Spider, she at least spared the young wife the harsh, nagging, condemnatory words of reproach and recrimination.

Every morning the selfsame question was asked and answered:

“You were at Kiyomidzu yesterday, my daughter?”

“HÉ, honorable mother.”

“And—?”

“The gods are obdurate, alas!”

Lady Saito would mechanically knock out the ash from her pipe and refill it with her trembling fingers. Then, shaking her head, she would mutter:

“From the decree of heaven there is no escape!”