“Hard!” cried his mother, savagely. “Is it harder than for a mother to see her only son enmeshed in the web of a vile Spider?”
Moonlight had sprung up sharply now. Her eyes were like wells of fire as, her bosom heaving, she started toward the older woman. A grim smile distorted the features of the Lady Saito Ichigo. As the girl advanced toward her, with that unconsciously threatening motion, this old woman of patrician ancestry neither moved nor retreated a space. In her cold, sneering gaze one read the disdain of the woman of caste who sees one whom she deems beneath her betray her lowly origin.
“Moonlight!” She felt herself caught by the shoulders in a grip that almost pained. She caught but a glimpse of his face. It was livid. Feeling that he, too, was deserting her, she uttered a loud cry, and covering her face with her sleeve, she fled from the room.
And all that night she lay weeping and trembling in the arms of her husband. In vain he besought her not to abandon herself to such wild and terrible grief. Moonlight was very, very sure, she told him, that all the gods of the heavens and the seas had deserted her forever and forever. She dreamed of an abyss into which she was pushed and which closed inexorably about her, and from which not even the loving arms of the Lord Saito Gonji could rescue her.
CHAPTER XII
THE quiet that comes before a tempest reigned for a few days in the household. Like a volcano whose pent-up energy is the more violent from long repression, it burst its bounds upon the return of the master.
Day and night they renewed the argument. Now Lord Ichigo was in firm agreement with his wife on the subject. There was no other course. Moonlight must go. Without descendants, who would there be to make the offerings and pray for their souls and those of the ancestors?
And again he was won over to his son’s side. Well, it would do no harm to wait another year. Moonlight was, as they had pointed out, still very young and healthy. There was every likelihood that she would bear children.