had come no words of sorrow or ill-omen must be spoken. So each was determined, but it was no easy matter to keep things going. The child was brought in, its infant beauty shining like a jewel in the greyness of the dawn. The grandfather never wearied of holding it in his arms and, young as it was, an understanding seemed to have grown up between them. He was indeed astonished by the readiness with which the child accepted a companion whose appearance and manners, so different from those of its regular attendants, might have been expected to have alarmed it in the highest degree. Moreover there seemed something inappropriate, almost sinister in their alliance. Yet for long he had scarcely let it be a minute out of his sight. How should he live without it? He did not want to spoil the journey by an outburst of unrestrained grief; yet utterly silent he could not remain, and reciting the verse: 'While for good speed upon their road and happiness to come I pray, one thing the travellers will not deny me, an old man's right to shed a foolish tear or two,' he tried to hide his tears with his sleeve, exclaiming: 'No, I ought not to; I should not do it!'
His wife stood weeping at his side; there was one thing that she could not disguise from herself after long years both of his life and her own that had been spent in an unceasing protest against the pleasures and frivolities of the world, it was to those same frivolities and in pursuit of the most worldly ambitions that her husband was sending her away from him: 'Together we left the city,' she cried; 'how all alone shall I re-find the paths down which you led me over heath and hill?' The Lady of Akashi also recited a poem in which she said that even to those who seem to have parted forever, life with its turns and chances brings strange reunions to pass. She besought her father to come at least part of the way with them; but he seemed to
