she was young. What times those had been! And how long, how cruelly long ago it all was! ‘First,’ answered Ukon gravely, ‘you must give me a little of your news. Is nurse with you? And what has happened to the baby girl … and Ateki, where is she?’ For the moment Ukon could not bear to dash Sanjō’s hope to the ground; moreover it was so painful to her to speak of Yūgao’s death that she now listened in silence to Sanjō’s tale: mother, brother and sister were all there. Tamakatsura was grown to be a fine young lady and was with them too. ‘But here I am talking,’ said Sanjō at last, ‘when I ought to have run straight in to tell nurse, …’ and with this she disappeared. After their first surprise the chief feeling of Ateki and her mother, upon the reception of this news, was one of indignation against Ukon, whom they supposed to have left their mistress in hiding all these years, callously indifferent to the suspense and misery of all her friends. ‘I don’t feel that I want to see her,’ said the old nurse at last, nodding in the direction of Ukon’s room, ‘but I suppose I ought to go.’ No sooner, however, was she sitting by Ukon’s couch, with all the curtains drawn aside, than both of them burst into tears. ‘What has become of her, where is my lady?’ the nurse sobbed. ‘You cannot imagine what I have been through in all these years. I have prayed again and again that some sign, some chance word, some dream might tell me where she was hiding. But not one breath of news came to us, and at last I thought terrible things—that she must be very far away indeed. Yes, I have even imagined that she must be dead, and fallen then into such despair that I hated my own life and would have ended it too, had not my love for the little girl whom she left with me held my feet from the Paths of Night. And even so, you see for yourself what I am…. It is but a faint flicker of life….’
