“It is one more device, perchance, of my enemies,” he had said, dully, in the first bitterness that came when the lad’s words had touched his heart.
Now, when all was over, he was again, in spite of his will, weighing the possibilities. Of course there might be truth in what Jiro had said, but it could not be determined save in the eyes of the Lady Wistaria herself, and now the lad Jiro had not come, as he had promised.
With a profound sigh, Mori, raising his head, caught sight again of the two swords. Yes, they held their meaning for him. Jiro’s words were not worthy of belief. He stretched out his hands to the swords.
“She was false—and Jiro lied!” he muttered.
His hand sought and found the hilt of one of the swords and grasped it firmly, stiffened, and fell to his side. Suddenly the face of the Lady Wistaria with its all-pervading purity and truth-compelling quality arose before his vision. As he regarded the unsought vision which had come to his uncontrolled imagination, it dawned upon him with a sudden, great light that he had been wrong—wrong. Back to his consciousness floated that dark night by the side of the stagnant moat, the memory of the tortured white face that shone out from the interlacing boughs of bushes about them, the trembling hands and the little water-soaked feet. Were she utterly false as he had thought, would she have thus come to him to warn him of the danger that encompassed the one she did not know was he himself?
A great upheaval arose in Keiki. The rush of emotions ingulfed him. A cry, a groan, escaped him, as, burying his face in his arms, he threw from him the swords.
“She was truth itself,” he said. “It is I who have wronged her—I who have been unworthy.”
“Too late!” a voice within his world-dulled soul said. He recalled now the intelligence he had heard somewhere many months before. The Princess of Mori had become a priestess of the Temple Zuiganji.
“My lord!”
The voice behind him, vaguely familiar, passed into that of the boy Jiro.