“It is as I say.”

“Then you are a better man than I; I did not know as much.”

“Thank you,” replied Ieyasu, not any the more disconcerted by the master’s thrust.

Hideyoshi for once looked Ieyasu squarely in the eyes.

“Well?” inquired the underling, boldly.

“If you have spoken truly—your fortune is made; if not—I shall send you to Korea,” replied Hideyoshi, composedly.

“Then—I am a made man,” retorted Ieyasu, seemingly settled upon some sort of true conviction.

Interpreting Ieyasu’s last remark in the most favorable light, as always done, when possible, Hideyoshi’s enthusiasm waxed significantly, if unexpectedly afresh. At last Ieyasu, by a ruse, had done something more than wait; the Chinese fantasy had been brought suddenly to a halt, and Japan saved probable humiliation, to say nothing of absolute defeat; Hidaye had already been all but crushed, and that, too, without getting beyond the confines of weak, unprepared, and unwarlike Korea. Had Hideyoshi himself left Japanese soil, with his contemplated reserve force, the trap laid by the wily Chin Ikei, China’s over-matching envoy, might have defeated more potent, if less fantastic, ambitions even than Hideyoshi’s.

None, but one, knew better than Ieyasu the futility of the taiko’s foreign project, nor was he any the less positive whom that might be, or of her desperate struggle against almost certain disaster: yet he believed Hideyoshi the father of her child, and bided thence patiently the further exactions of an inner conscience.

“She is both worthy and capable,” reasoned he, to himself, contentedly, “and I shall henceforth follow in the wake of an ambition higher than mine, more tolerable than Hideyoshi’s.”