Thus Nara--kugé and devoted servant of the Holy Mikado--having been warned by the Abbess of Tsu of the tottering condition of her house, came and spied out the land, and returned home delighted; while she, hearing in due course how he had come and gone, smiling and dangerously courteous, fell a prey to vague misgivings, and betook herself to prayer and abstinence. Vainly she cross-examined O'Tei, grown stonier and whiter. Since her father's unsatisfactory visit, the unhappy lady appeared to wake from a frozen trance to a sense of feverish existence, only when prostrate on the temple floor praying for the untying of her bonds. The words of Koshiu were seared as by an iron on her heart; sleeping or waking, she saw them burning on the wall. The scene within the grey circle of weird trees was never absent from her vision. What had she done to deserve the ban? The full horror of the anathema ate into her being slowly. In succeeding cycles she was destined to be accursed. Little by little she realised her doom; for her there was to be no rest, no peace, no change for the better. Why? Because, obedient to her father's commands, she had bestowed her hand upon a tyrant. For blind obedience, punished for all time; for more than time--for ever! There was no justice, then, in this life, or in the realms beyond the grave. She was created for misfortune and misery, specially picked out for all the worst evils that beset mortality. If accursed in future cycles, she might never rise,--never win Nirvana,--never hope for oblivion. The unflecked blackness of the despair that settled down like a foldless sable curtain upon O'Tei, caused the heart of Masago to bleed for her. The gentlest, noblest, most patient, as well as the most innocent of ladies! Truly the ways of the Eternal are inscrutable. The austere Abbess strove to instil comfort into the numbed soul--without avail. Her arguments, after all, were shallowest platitudes, to be tossed aside by O'Tei with easy scorn. What to her were the puny arts of O'Kikú the second wife? Shielded by the buckler of such suffering as hers, the tiny pins of the geisha fell harmless. Pity that 'twas so, for wholesome indignation might have wakened her from the stupor which, unless broken, must shortly end in dissolution.