A cross and an image bore they—thence duty called her; the purpose stood revealed.

CHAPTER VI

With her eyes thus opened, mysticism disappeared: the elements crackled, and out of consciousness there arose a determination to survive any test that might be imposed. All her tender life had been surrendered faithfully and uncompromisingly to the harsher edicts of conventional man; and stern realism had bidden her renounce every impulse; there had seemed no alternative to save honor—the gods demanded it, the family claimed it, and self had not dared deny death its sole reward.

Then, as womanhood arrived, barely kissed fain consciousness, in one stolen rapport, just an unguarded moment, the godlight once shone in, had seized upon her, made it seem as if there was a heaven, as if God himself had touched her very soul and the blessed come to earth—a little thing as insignificant as any worm or bird or animal, only a fox, had come between her and what she might have had for the taking; and that, too, without disturbing as she believed her father’s plans in the least or suffering the pain of being left in the world to do penance for a thing that she knew to be wholly beyond the reach or concern of her own insignificant little self.

Yodogima had been cast out, degraded, and left to makeshift, but not defeated. In that one moment of utter helplessness she had resolved to meet the world as found, and to make of life what God intended—an abiding faith in that we know and not a conjured reach toward something fancied.

Ieyasu had promised her protection—his love he had given her—and she believed him capable and true; that she had renounced Katsutoya and accepted Ieyasu rightly, though against every obligation that she knew developments had proven beyond peradventure. Her father had anticipated an impossibility, asked her to stultify every moral consideration on her part to gratify an ambition of his, that proved at the first test to be utterly groundless and without the shadow of a compensating hope. Accident or will had denied her the privilege of an explanation; fate alone, for all she knew, had interposed to lay bare the secret of her heart at an inopportune moment, and a fancied code had sought to crush her beneath its ruthless dictum at a time when the very heart-chords of repentance called loudest for pleasing atonement.

It seemed as if the same god who had torn her therefrom must save her unto himself; and her heart bled for him alone.

“Ieyasu,” cried she, more confident than ever.