“I have made a long journey!”
Said Moonlight, calmly:
“You come to seek your son’s son?”
“Nay,” said the aged woman, and she put out a trembling hand and caught beseechingly at the arm of the geisha. “I have come for thee, too, my daughter!”
A silence, unbroken save by the sobs of the little Omi, fell now between them. Then said the geisha, very gently:
“Speak your—will—all-highest one. I—I will try to—to serve the honorable ancestors of the Saito, even though it be necessary to make the supreme sacrifice.”
Her hands fumbled with the strings that bound the child in its bag upon her back. Now she had swung it round in front. The child’s little face, rosy in sleep, rolled back upon her arm. She felt the hungry arms of the woman beside her reaching out irresistibly toward the child; and, though she tried to smile, a sob tore from her lips as she lifted her baby and put it solemnly into the arms of its grandmother. Then she turned her back quickly, and Omi sprang up and received her into her arms.
Suddenly she felt the shaking fingers of the aged woman upon her shoulder. She said, with her face still hidden and her voice muffled by sobs:
“I pray you go, hastily, lest my love prove greater than my strength.”
“The journey is long,” said Lady Saito. “Let us set out at once, my daughter. I go not back without thee.”