In Masago’s hands was the same picture of the martial prince-hero which she had once cut from a Chinese magazine, and which since then she had never ceased to adore. Always this shining prince was entangled in her other dreams. Hands and eyes now both were fixed upon her heart’s desire.
To her the stately palace Aoyama bespoke that other world, intoxicating, ecstatic, desirable, upon the very edge of which she might not even cling,—she who had been born to it. The innate craving of the Prince of Nijo for the sensations of the upper world ate at the very heart of the daughter of Ohano. To her, life in this world was the most desirable thing on earth; it must satisfy every craving of the mind and heart, and in it, Masago knew, belonged her hero-prince. She was not the only humble maiden of Japan who secretly worshipped the nation’s martial hero, but possibly her love for him was a more personal thing, because deep in the girl’s consciousness always was the knowledge that she might have been worthy of him, had not the irony of fate willed it otherwise, and set her here, a thing apart from him, caged and guarded by such surroundings,—she, a daughter of the Prince of Nijo and blood niece to the Emperor of Japan.
Only three days before the royal fiancée of her hero had arrived at the palace Aoyama. There, sheltered, nurtured, and watched over, the favored daughter of the gods, report had said, had gone into maiden retirement pending her nuptials. Masago thought of her with feelings akin to hatred, impotent and desperate, but ceaseless. She knew that on the morrow this Princess Sado-ko would resume her journey to the city of Tokyo. Soon she would have joined her lover, her future husband, in the capital.
“To-night,” said Masago, moistening her dry lips, “she will think of him, and all night long,—it is her privilege. While I—I, too, will think of him—”
She hid her miserable face within her hands and rocked herself to and fro, thinking of what the morrow must do for her. She knew that Kamura Junzo, her affianced, had returned to Kamakura. Had not her parents gone this very day to attend a family council? Masago had been glad of the creeping fog which slowly spread across the land, as she knew this would prevent her parents’ return that night. She had craved for these moments of maiden privacy. Soon they must cease when she had been given to this man for wife.