O'Tei turned deathly pale, and, catching her breath painfully, leant against the screen. She would indeed have fallen, if one of the kago-bearers had not presumed to catch and hold her in his arms. Her lord! How long was it ago that she had disdainfully given up all hope of influencing him? She was weak and wrong. It was a crime--she saw it now--but too late--too late! That separating thicket had grown so dense, that there was no hewing a passage through it. If the harrowed wife of the victim was suffering, how much more the sensitive young chatelaine, whose nerves were so highly strung! The man, if he perished, was a martyr in the cause of right. Each new delinquency of the Hojo was a fresh hammer-stroke on his wife's heart. Out of his sight, O'Tei strove to forget his wickedness, the full measure of which she had learned to guess by this time. On her frequent visits to the temple she prayed with sweat of agony for his reformation, for the repentance of him who, alas! was bone of her bone for life. She was his--part and parcel of himself--and yet she saw, with a sickening horror and sense of self-upbraiding, that he grew worse and worse--more cruel and more reckless,--while she, with folded hands, looked on. In a vague, terror-stricken way she wondered what grisly phantom lurked behind the veil, what vengeance would fall from heaven. And might not this moral descent be in some sort her own doing, in that, while interference might have been of service, she had been too hurt and proud to attempt to stay his course? If he had no conscience, she had enough for both. Oh, for a dose of Tomoyé's spirit,--of the unbending pluck of the militant grandam concerning whom the samurai were always trolling ditties. But no!--the warriors were right--she unfitted for her station. Her burthen--the sooner the better--might crush and kill her. She quailed at the thought of ever seeing again the tyrant in whom there were no bowels of compassion, and who seemed to take delight in augmenting the calamities of his fellows. Herself as grey as a corpse, she bent down and kissed the writhing woman, and without a word (how could she console her?), with parched lips and catching breath, swung away to her garden on the mountain. What was she to do? What could she do? If, by giving over her own tender body to the pincers of the torturers, she could assuage the growing trouble of the people, how gladly would she bare her breast. But no--she was condemned to sit and watch, with idle hands and dread forebodings, a horror-stricken spectator of her husband's deepening sin, and the lingering anguish of his victims.