Taking his departure forthwith, Oyea bowed low and reverently—not so much, perhaps, now, out of respect for a husband alone, or for anything he had done personally to deserve as much, but more as a result of some inner quality or natural-born trait that abuse could not eradicate or dull even into vain misapprehension. Oyea was of better stock than Hideyoshi: better insofar as tradition or probability had seen fit to record and make known, yet looking out upon the world in which she lived, and reflecting the obligations imposed by a social organization with which it seemed that she had had so little to do, a growing sense of something wanting burned the harder into her now softeningly bewildered consciousness. Had she accused him wrongly? Might it be, after all, verily some shortcoming of her own which had for so long a time denied to him an inalienable right? And what of society?

Her religion—that one handed down from an ancestry antedating all creeds, surmounting any profession—had provided the means of escaping just such a failure as she, by virtue of feeling as pitted against reason, had suffered; though as religiously, if not as rigorously, courted. And why had she done so?

The only reason that she could fairly call to mind was that the priests had told her differently; that a dawning trust in Christ was at that very moment sapping the only foundation that she may have had for a belief; that the doctrines of a new church were separating her forever and helplessly from all that had been dear and possible to her and hers—and, asked she, of herself, and her God:

“For what?”

Oyea awaited patiently some response from this newly proclaimed Savior, whom the priests had set over her and home—no other voice than conscience answered; and therein she conjured many thoughts, divined a reason for things, and fell hopelessly at the shrine of an uncontrollable, undenying, born-unto impulse. Yodogima possessed an attraction, Kami in his wisdom had equated life and death, and no man’s blood or woman’s want could save a soul or regenerate an unregenerate.

Then she marvelled the seeming vanity of all that is more than crude, and out of the black there rushed the possible saving grace of man’s own involution-both prayer and confession had failed to wrest her from worse than perdition.

“That woman enjoy my husband’s favor, in a castle of her own, because she is more than I? Hugh! I’ll see her humbled.”

“Otoshi?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Fetch the smelling-salts, and my vanity case. Further, I shall not require your service, perhaps, till the sun is risen—at Ozaka.”