“Before, or after?” inquired the shogun, without so much as smiling.

“Presumably you may think it as easily done,” retorted she, the pride of blood, for the nonce, asserting some sort of peculiar sway.

The Taira, however, had measured swords with the Minamoto centuries before Esyo inadvertently condescended to vouchsafe this one lonely thrill, and Ieyasu perhaps, therefore, sooner learned to attend the reckoning that awaited him, in this his final effort to dislodge an intrepid foe. Were the last fight to have been fought with a man, the battle-scarred Ieyasu had buckled on his armor, and gladly; but look as he might, heed whom he chose, Yodogima, a love of his and an offspring of theirs, rose up, out of the smoldering embers, to bid and to challenge.

“My God! I cannot face her—oh, yes; I can; she is nothing to me—curse the Christians! I’ll slay them—”

“No you won’t,” threatened Jokoin, in her way, having entered shortly after Esyo’s withdrawal, in the course of the hearer’s meditation; “they’ve got powder to burn, of a right good quality—just in from Hirado, the foreigners’ hold out—and a pound of it is worth a lot of valor—”

“I’ll double the price; tell your friends that Ieyasu is in the market for powder.”

“And a wife, as well. But you can’t have Yodogima; she’s given you the mit.”

“Silence, child; will you never use modesty; you are in the presence of the shogun?”

“Oh, I wonder—indeed I’m not; you have no right to be shogun, and what isn’t right isn’t; there now! I shall take my orders from Hideyori: perhaps marry him, if Takiyama, Goto, Sanada, and all the rest worth while—”

“You have a husband.”