In gentle depression she moved toward the house, then slowly up the steps to Masago’s balcony, from which she watched the children take their morning bath in the family pond. It was a pretty sight, she thought, to see their little bare, brown bodies shining in the sun. A little later the elder children went whistling down the path to school while the nurse disappeared with the younger ones.
“Strange,” said Princess Sado-ko, “that none of them seemed glad to see their sister. Was not Masago loved, then?”
She pushed the doors open and thoughtfully entered the chamber.
“Perhaps,” she said, “the foreigners speak truth. What is that pretty proverb of their honorable religion? Is it not, ‘The love begets the love’? Masago plainly did not love her little brothers. Hence they have but indifference for her.”
Again she sighed.
“Ah,” she said, “what kind of maiden, then, is this I have exchanged for me?”
She saw the tumbled couch upon which she had slept. She recalled the fact that Masago had told her she would be required to make her own bed and attend her own chamber, for Kwacho deemed such household tasks desirable and admirable in a woman.
Therefore the exalted Princess Sado-ko, the daughter of the sun-god, as she was called by all loyal Japanese, fell to work upon the homely employment of rolling up a mattress bed, beating the little rocking pillow, folding the quilts and the netting. Suddenly she sat down breathlessly among the simple paraphernalia which constituted Masago’s bed. She had forgotten where the maid Masago had told her the clothes were kept! The little thought perplexed and troubled the Princess Sado-ko.
CHAPTER XVIII