Shibata slunk back, and amid the confusion an old woman seemingly, clad in black with drawn hood, carrying a strange bundle, whispered in Yodogima’s ear. In a twinkling the knowing princess had donned the disguise and with no other apparent escort made her way toward Kitanoshi, safely tucked away behind the mountain range in the distance.

CHAPTER III

The day dawned bright, and all Kitanoshi livened with anticipation. Great masses of foliage bended or thirsted under the golden dew drops that trickled and glistened in the creeping sun’s modest warmth. Everywhere men and women, clad in comfort or donning their due, wafting song-words or grumbling at fate, busied themselves with that beginning which marks the endless round of time’s eternal quest and God’s immutable law. Little had been left to the wild, for here the untrained had long ago found his tenantless haven; the ox and the fragile alike had surrendered to the call of higher being; here, where the human over-lords the beast, man went his way: marveled only at the beauties of God-striven energy.

Shibata eagerly tripped again into the council chamber; years of earnestness sat lightly upon his shoulders; Takigawa of Ise was there to meet him; both had suffered intolerable insult at Hideyoshi’s ruthless assumption of authority, and now that others more vain or less discerning sought shelter under their own disconsolate roofs these two, more subtle, if less capable, would consolidate forces and move upon what they none too soon conceived to be a common necessity.

Ieyasu arose later; life to him seemed the better conserved in leisure; and while Shibata, his host, and Takigawa, his neighbor, wrangled the exigencies of war, or planned doubtful expediencies, a more inviting, though perhaps no less urgent prospect lolled and soothed the gallant young daimyo into more than a customary morning’s peaceful dreaming of love’s over-powering, life-building virtue.

“Yodogima, my Yodogima,” whispered he, as the great red sun arose and cast its fiery rays into the opened room around him.

“You are mine, for Amaterasu, the good sun goddess, reveals you, sweet Yodogima, in every trace of her lovely countenance. Come closer, oh, my darling; come closer, that Ieyasu may feel, may know, may live the divine. You are my savior, earth’s true progenitor, and the stars in heaven reveal but your eternity. O, Amaterasu; O, Jimmu; O, Yodogima—my Light, my Purpose, my God.”

The waterfall in the distance murmured its time-honored song of powers subdued. The pine, dwarfed into miniature proportions, revealed the potency of patience rigidly enforced. Nodding stones here and there symbolized again and anon the power of truth. A half-hidden lakelet in the distance conjured a magnitude there impossible, and from the castle crag in the garden’s center, receding round to the dim horizon beyond, no thing remained untouched or thought neglected in the making of this a place not alone inhabitable but as well inviting.