Kinsan did not speak as they walked, but fell into a deep study. Whether it came to her intuitively or from a change in Tetsutaisho's mood she partially understood him, and as they approached the house and she thought of her mother a feeling of fear took hold of her and she trembled and hesitated. She knew of their straitened circumstances and of how her mother had repeatedly chided her father for not having taken advantage of Tetsutaisho's former liberal offer. The ends of her fingers tingled, then grew cold, and the perspiration stood in great beads on her forehead. When they had arrived at the house and her mother came running out, bowing to the visitor, Kinsan's heart sickened, and she no longer possessed that confidence in her father which had hitherto buoyed her under each successive trial. "It is the hand of fate, and I am its certain victim," was the thought which ran through her mind and would not go away. When the rest entered the house she politely withdrew, unnoticed, and went away, far into the woods, and on and on until she came to the hidden cave, where every rock and all the flowers and even the stars had sung again and again of her great love and Shibusawa's faith. She did not return, but lingered and stayed, and prayed fresh prayers; and then she thought she saw him there bending over her; she heard him speak and looked into his eyes, and felt again the power of his love. After a long time she went away, and when far from the cave and all about was darkness and she was uncertain of her way a chill came over her and she thought of the tempter's bait and her mother's weakness. "Would to God that I, too, had found a way!" was her last thought as she nestled upon her wooden pillow, and at last slept a broken, restless sleep. Late that evening Tetsutaisho left the cottage and lightly tripped along down the pathway toward his own house. As he went his steps quickened, and he almost ran with delight. He carried in his girdle a document which on the morrow he would safely file and thus insure the proper keeping of its lawful provisions. Upon his arrival he hurriedly entered the house, and that night Takara may have had, for the first time, misgivings of a weaker purpose on Tetsutaisho's part than she herself had divined. However that may have been, it mattered not to Tetsutaisho, for on the following day his own carriers set in front of the gardener's cottage a beautiful lacquered chair into which there stepped a weeping, sorrowing child; a daughter whose only price was the worth of her virtue, whose only hope lay in the power of her own frail hands. She went, and with her the rags that hung upon her back. There was not a mother's blessing, and the father had slunk back from witnessing the fruit of a heartless wife's bargaining. It was not the first. Others had likewise served. And the fathers and mothers had for ages eagerly and unknowingly partaken of the wages. CHAPTER XVII