losing her looks, had now grown quite middle-aged. He asked her many questions about her experiences in these last months, to which she replied frankly and without any shyness. He felt sorry that he had sent her to waste the last hours of her vanishing youth in so dull a place and now said sympathetically: 'Here too you are a long way from everything and it is not at all easy for me to come over. I wish you would persuade your mistress to make use of the apartments I originally offered her. . . .' 'We must see how we get on,' the Lady of Akashi interposed.
That night at least she had no reason to complain of neglect and day came only too swiftly. During the morning he gave fresh instructions to the retainers who were responsible for the redecoration of the house, and presently a number of people who farmed on and around his Katsura estate came to pay their respects, having heard beforehand that he was about to visit his properties in this neighbourhood. As they were there, he thought he had better make them useful and set them to work repairing some places in the Lodge where the shrubs had been trodden down. 'I see,' he said, 'that some of the artificial rocks have rolled over and almost disappeared under the grass. I must get my people to hoist them up again into some position in which they will not look quite so pointless. However this is not the kind of garden that looks the better for too much trouble being taken with it; and you may not be staying here very long. It will not do to make everything here too nice or it will soon be as hard to go away from here as it was to leave Akashi.' Soon they fell to talking of those old days, now laughing, now weeping, but all the time divinely happy. Once her mother came and peeped at them as they sat talking and the sight of their happiness made her forget that she herself was old, was wretched. Wreathed in smiles she hobbled away from the room. A
