Again she pondered the words, and she shivered under her husband’s melancholy glance. What did the strange words imply? Consideration for her future merely? Surely he must know that, as the wife of one so illustrious as he must become, she would never marry another in his place. (Every Japanese woman resigns her husband to war service with the proud and pious belief and hope that he will not return, but will gloriously sacrifice life for the cause.)
Finally she said, as she watched his face stealthily:
“It will be unnecessary for the humble one to choose another companion. Glorious will be the privilege of awaiting the time when she will join your honor on the journey.”
He gave her a deep look, which seemed to pierce and search to the very depths of her heart.
“Ohano,” he said, “thou knowest I did not marry thee save for the time of this life.”
She sat up stiffly, mechanically, moistening her dry lips. All the petty vanity with which she had upheld herself since the day when she had married Saito Gonji now seemed to drop from her in shreds. Her many days of supreme devotion, and even adoration, for the Lord Gonji—and they stretched back as far as her childhood days—came up to torture her. Looking into her husband’s face, Ohano knew, without questioning, who it was who would make the final precious journey with him. She was to be wife only for the short span of his lifetime. That other one, the Spider—whose image in effigy she had pricked so mercilessly with a thousand spiteful pins in order to destroy her soul, as she fain would have done her body—she was to be the wife of Saito Gonji for all time! She who had stolen him from Ohano upon her very wedding-night!
Her face became convulsed. The eyes seemed to have disappeared from her face. Presently, breathing heavily, her hands clutching her breast to repress the emotion which would show despite her best efforts:
“I pray you permit your humble wife to attend your lordship upon the journey,” she said. “Who else is competent to travel at your side, my lord?”
He did not answer her. He was looking out of an open shoji, and his face in the moonlight seemed as if carved in marble, so set, so rigid, immovable as that of one dead.
Ohano rose desperately to her feet. She felt unspeakably weak from the excess of her inner passion. At that moment gladly would she have exchanged places with the homeless and outcast wife of Saito Gonji, who in the end was to come to that eternal bliss so rigorously denied to Ohano.