forgotten all this, or will ever do so. It has been his one desire since that day to find some means of expiating, in however small a degree, the guilt which brought my lady to her unhappy end; and often I have heard him long that he might one day be able to bring such happiness to Lady Yūgao’s child as would in some sort make amends for all that she had lost. Indeed, having few children, he has always planned, if she could but be found, to adopt her as his own, and he begged me to speak of her always as a child of his, whom he had placed with country folk to be nursed.
‘But in those days I had seen very little of the world and was so much scared by all that had happened that I dared not go about making enquiries. At last I chanced one day to see your husband’s name in a list of provincial clerks. I even saw him, though at some distance, the day he went to the Prime Minister’s palace to receive confirmation of his new appointment. I suppose I ought to have spoken to him then; but somehow or other I could not bring myself to do so. Sometimes I imagined that you had left Lady Tamakatsura behind, at the house in the Fifth Ward; for the thought of her being brought up as a little peasant girl on the island was more than I could endure….’
So they spent the day, now talking, now praying, or again amusing themselves by watching the hordes of pilgrims who were constantly arriving at the temple gate. Under their windows ran a river called the Hatsuse, and Ukon now recited the acrostic poem: ‘Had I not entered the gate that the Twin Fir-Trees guard, would the old river of our days e’er have resumed its flow?’ To this Tamakatsura answered: ‘Little knew I of those early days as this river knows of the hill from whence it sprang.’ She sat gently weeping. But Ukon made no effort to comfort her, feeling that now all was on the right path. Considering Tamakatsura’s upbringing no one would have blamed her if there
