“You must not be found with a real spider on your breast! I will leave you now, and you can say you have lost your pin.”
With these words he dropped to the ground and ran when he thought no one would notice. But one person did notice; that was the lady Lu Tsing. She tried to kill him with her foot, but he escaped again and again, till suddenly she picked up a cup from the tea-table, turned it up-side down and trapped him under it.
The Emperor greeted Nikko with honeyed words, but the lady Lu Tsing having caught the Spider, retreated to the furthest, darkest chamber of the palace, where she tore up all the curtains and bed-spreads and bureau-scarfs in her wrath till the room looked like a rag-man’s house. Then she sat down among the wreckage and plotted revenge.
Nikko would have been quite happy if she had not been so worried about her bare feet. Sooner or later they would be discovered and oh, what would the Emperor think of her then? Just now he took her hand and said to her:
“My dear, you must tell me what you would like for a wedding gift!” And Nikko almost cried out: “Shoes, your Majesty, shoes!” but she did not want to give herself away, so she replied,
“Well, I do not know which I would rather have, a bright brocaded shawl or a new pair of slippers!”
“You shall have both,” declared the Emperor, and ordered a maiden to fetch them. Nikko donned the shawl and slipped on the little shoes but they were so small that they hurt her feet dreadfully.
“Ah well,” she said to herself, biting back tears of pain. “I shall have to get used to some discomforts now that I am to be an Empress!”
She had been Empress for about a week, when her husband the Emperor fell very ill. It really was indigestion after the wedding-feast, but of course the doctors wanted to make it something more dignified, so they said: