"She will remain under your roof, good Tetsujo, and be treated with courtesy," corrected the prince.
"Let me go as a nurse! Oh, I could never stay with them! Their harsh eyes would flay me! I feel even now their hatred!"
"Not mine, my baby, my only child!" wailed Iriya. "Think not so of your mother's imperishable love!"
Yuki at last hid her face. The note of anguish in her mother's voice overcame her pathetic defiance.
"My official residence is cold and lonely," remarked Haganè, sipping slowly at some tea. "It sorely needs a mistress well acquainted with foreign etiquette. Foreigners are to be met and conciliated. The Emperor himself, and his shining spouse, would receive one who so served her land, and hear from her own lips impressions of America, and the sentiments of the people there toward us. A woman's intuition is keen, and penetrates farther than a man's weightier judgment,—just as the tendrils of a vine creep into lattices which a tree would only darken. It is in such a capacity, Yuki-ko, that you could do immediate good. My disorganized servants would again be set into grooves of usefulness. Another reason, which must not be spoken openly, as yet,—I may soon be called to the front, and the several residences should not be closed."
"Lord! You would trust with such responsibilities a weak, untutored girl like me?"
"Yes, little one, I would trust you."
"And I would be in all respects—your—wife?" asked Yuki, in a very low tone.
"Yes. Why not? What is the human body but a petal drifting in the wind? If, for a moment, the bright tint or the fleeting perfume please, is it not best to grasp the trivial pleasure? Yet it is to great things that I call you, Onda Yuki. Things of service, of the spirit, heroism perhaps, perhaps self-sacrifice,—for the flesh is stubborn. This shall be your proof of loyalty to your Emperor and to this land!"
"I would gladly die for them!" she cried.