Her hands moved restlessly in her lap.
“Are there not other ladies of the royal house more exalted than I?” she asked.
“None, illustrious princess,” he answered coldly.
She turned her miserable face aside, and stared at the company with eyes that would fill with tears. Suddenly, hardly conscious of her words, she exclaimed, in a low, passionate voice:—
“I hate it all! I hate it all!”
The Crown Prince stared in astonishment at her feverishly flushed face.
“I overheard your words, princess,” he said, with forbidding candor. “I do not know to what you are alluding. The words themselves have an unseemly sound.”
She pressed her lips together, and sat in bitter silence after that. Suddenly she became conscious of compelling eyes upon her. She moved and breathed with a new excitement. Then she heard the Crown Prince speaking in a sarcastic, drawling way, which already she had begun to dislike.
“Our cousin, here, Komatzu, is sick for Kamakura.”
She turned her helpless eyes upon Komatzu’s face. To her passionate, hungry eyes he appeared impassive and unmoved. Had the horrible tidings, then, left him only cold? Were the words of love he had whispered so often in her ear but the carefully prepared words of a formal suitor? Was he so much a prince that he could mask his heart behind so impenetrable a countenance?