servations and precautions. Presently one of his accustomed excursions to the oratory at Saga gave him an excuse for a visit to Ōi. ‘What a lonely place to live in always!’ he thought as he approached the house, and even if the people living there had been quite unknown to him he would have felt a certain concern on their behalf. But when he thought how she must wait for him day after day and how seldom her hopes could ever be fulfilled, he suddenly felt and showed an overwhelming compassion towards her. This however had only the effect of making her more than ever inconsolable. Seeking for some means of distracting her mind, he noticed that behind a tangle of close-set trees points of flame were gleaming—the flares of the cormorant-fishers at work on Ōi River; and with these lights, sometimes hardly distinguishable from them, blended the fire-flies that hovered above the moat. ‘It is wonderful here,’ said Genji; ‘you too would feel so, were not one’s pleasure always spoiled by familiarity.’ ‘Those lights on the water!’ she murmured. ‘Often I think that I am still at Akashi. “As the fisher’s flare that follows close astern, so in those days and in these has misery clung to my tossing bark, and followed me from home to home.” ’ ‘My love,’ he answered, ‘is like the secret flame that burns brightly because it is hidden from sight; yours is like the fisherman’s torch, that flares up in the wind and presently is spent. No, no; you are right,’ he said after a pause; ‘life (yours and mine alike) is indeed a wretched business.’ It happened to be a time at which he was somewhat less tied and harassed than of late, and he was able to devote himself more wholeheartedly than usual to the proceedings at his oratory. This kept him in the district for several days on end, a circumstance which did not often occur and which he hoped would, for the moment at any rate, make her feel a little less neglected.
