“Yes; it is she; and, you are safe at Kyogoku’s.”

“I shall remain here,” replied Jokoin, unobserved by Yodogima; whose interests had already settled upon one thought only.

These went their way, Yodogima accompanied by Kyogoku, to the latter’s yashiki, a commodious dwelling, nestled away among the samurai huts fringing the castle grounds all round well under the outlying city’s over-crowding borders. It was a sightly place and a safe one to which the honor-bound Kyogoku, a trusted intermediary, had led the proud, if anxious, princess, there to meet and do with life’s final consummation. The very walls around seemed to echo some fain portent, in keeping with time’s most cruelly adjudged, if seemly ending.

Harunaga lay hidden in the fastness of an humbler shrine builded farther up on the hillside overlooking the walls and guarding eagerly each approach. No deed of the hand or foulness of a heart should harm or hinder his ladyship’s grace as long as he might serve; he had divined well her secret, and marshalled afresh his own hardening courage: sought as best he knew to induce the moral which every man must finally know as in prudence wisely revealed.

She had gone there that Hideyori’s hand might not be stained, that a nation should rise upon the hard-burned figments of ambition, that her love attain its just reward, and an ideal come down from heaven to earth—a life’s work rounded out in God.

Weighing over against his own feelings a greater force, the obligations that he had incurred, this gray-haired bonze, faith’s most truly devoted, resolved in his own heart that she had chosen well, and that so long as he might prevent, her confidence should not be abused or Ieyasu’s word broken. Harunaga sat there, as he had lived, the sphinx, grinning against the gray and the dawn of duty.

Little birds twittered in the tree-tops, the frosts of winter threatened coming on, the shadows of evening were lengthening and casting their grim visages toward the treasured homestead she had left—

Two chairs, one bearing the three asarum leaves, the other an under man’s crest, came tottering up the long, crooked, narrow, and overshaded alley-way, the first ahead and the other after, their heads bobbing and poles creaking, to the patter of hurrying feet and bating of heated breaths. Harunaga, springing to his feet, edged closer to the wall, and peering hard through its miserly cracks muttered:

“It is well,” and the two passed on, to their vainly induced, if death averting, task.

Dismounting and dismissing the carriers, the two entered, at one side the larger passage, through a small, low gate in the massive unscalable stone fence surrounding the house; leaving and abandoning thus any means of defence or escape, for the gate once closed could not be again opened without assistance. Ieyasu apparently bore no weapon at all, and Honda carried only the customary appendages allowable to a gentleman of his worth and rank. Harunaga, it would seem, had adjudged rightly, for he gave the matter no further concern.