Part 25

Komatzu answered:—

“The Duchess Aoi and the Lady Moon both beguiled me into a like garden wandering. We came but by chance to your august gate.”

“But will you not step inside?” asked Sado-ko. “Pray, cousin, will you not walk with me?” she sweetly urged.

Glad to accompany his cousin, the prince, softly clapping his hands, ordered an attendant to unfasten the gate. Aoi was about to follow him to the other side, when stopped by the voice of the princess. “We do not need your further service to-night,” she said.

The mortified duchess bowed to the earth, and slowly moved away.

When she was gone and the Princess Sado-ko should have breathed more freely, a reaction came. She clung with sudden faintness to the waiting-maid, Natsu-no.

“Cousin, you are ill!” cried the dismayed Komatzu.

She tried to laugh, but her voice was shaking and her words piteous.

“I but stumbled on my gown, Sir Cousin.”

She raised herself, lifting the kimono a little upward from the ground.

“It is the punishment of vanity,” she continued in a somewhat weary voice. “I was not ready to part with my fair gown, Komatzu. It is of ancient style and very long and cumbersome.”

“But the embodiment of grace and beauty,” said Komatzu, gallantly.

She pursued this light conversation, in hope of diverting him as they passed on their way through the grove.

“What, Cousin Komatzu, you praise an Oriental gown,—you who are so much a modern!”

He glanced down smilingly at his evening dress, black, immaculate, and foreign.

“The honorable gown, fair cousin, is truly exquisite; still, I confess I do prefer the foreign style, and would that you did also.”

“But I should suffocate did I enclose my little frame in so honorably tight a garb,” she protested, and at the same moment she glanced about fearfully. Komatzu seemed to perceive something of her uneasiness, for he, too, cast a keen look about them.

In nervousness she began to speak again, for somewhere close at hand she heard a stir which set her heart to violent beating.

“My ladies beg permission to deck your statue with august flowers, cousin, and—Ah-h!”

She paused. Was it fancy only, or did she see a face staring out at her from the dense foliage hard by?

“I protest,” said Komatzu, stopping short in his walk, “that you, fair cousin, are ill. You are not your familiar self to-night.”

Her fingers clutched his arm as she drew him again along the path.

“No, no, no,” she denied, “I am quite well! Do not linger here, I pray you, Cousin Komatzu.”

He frowned, glancing out with brows drawn.

“I was thinking it an ideal spot for loitering, princess.”

“’Tis dark,” said Sado-ko, still hastening blindly on.

“The moonlight is on all sides, cousin, and pierces through the thin bamboos. And look upward—see how clear and beautiful the star-lit sky above us.”

Again he paused in admiring contemplation of the night.