Page:Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan.djvu/205

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Of Old Japan

On the day following his first letter this poem was sent:

To you I betrayed my heart—
Alas! Confessing
Brings deeper grief,
Lamenting days.

Feeling was rootless, but being unlearned in loneliness, and attracted, she wrote an answer:

If you lament to-day
At this moment your heart
May feel for mine—
For in sorrow
Months and days have worn away.

He wrote often and she answered—sometimes—and felt her loneliness a little assuaged. Again she received a letter. After expressing feelings of great delicacy:

[I would] solace [you] with consoling words
If spoken in vain
No longer could be exchanged.

To talk with you about the departed one; how would it be [for you] to come in the evening unobtrusively?

Her answer:

As I hear of comfort I wish to talk with you, but being an uprooted person there is no hope of my standing upright. I am footless [meaning, I cannot go to you].

Thus she wrote, and His Highness decided to come as a private person.

It was still daylight, and he secretly called his servant Ukon-no-zo, who had usually been the medium by which the letters had reached the Prince, and said,

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