The very thought of her great sin overbore Yodogima with a determination to survive any test. The walls around her resounded with a growth and a strength fairly laughing to scorn the very desirability of absolution--Ieyasu had done right, and yet erred; Christ filled a void, at least, and for that should not be cast upon. "I'll live down the wrong I've done," mused she, "and when it's absolved with the blood shed of my own veins, there'll be no need of condonations, and faith, hope, and charity, knowledge, uprightness or consideration, the state, the church, and the castes, shall have vanished in the stead of one united and indivisible brotherhood, where sin and sorrow, the virtues and the joys are no longer remembered of man." The countenance of her fathers looked down from an old kakemono (picture) hanging from the wall, behind the shrine, above the potted pine, with kindly expression. The princess gazed long and earnestly thereat, then said to herself: "You, too, shall vanish, and all that we prize or hate of this earth shall have sometime proven itself of no more final consequence than the slenderest reed that grows and withers with the rising and the setting of the sun. My little sins and virtues, his, and theirs, will then resolve and not abide the existence of a soul. God himself shall stand revealed, and the world attain its destined end--a heaven here where men are doomed, and none denied, of treasures yet undreamed." Sitting within the confines of her own allotted environment, far removed from the turmoils of rendering, shorn of creation's compensatory appeal, but clothed with the choicer products of highest endeavor, Yodogima, too, pondered the complexity of human nature, and its languor or celerity in rendering the tidy milestones so highly prized or bitterly condemned as we go. Yet, unlike Ieyasu, she had partaken thereof a self-suffered resignation. What the consequence? CHAPTER XXVII For the other, there seemed but a single course. He had exhausted, as it would appear, all the avenues open to him but one. No such thing as being born again had entered into Ieyasu's curriculum, and the very tenets of his religion scorned the lesser beatitudes of a troubled soul. Stoicism had survived mercy, and his goddess profaned the world must answer. "Concentrate at Fushima," commanded he, of Hidetada, now his favorite, and most trusted commander. "But Hideyasu is intractable: refuses to obey Hidetada, his younger," replied Esyo, before Hidetada, her husband, could make any answer. "Then let him be humbled; I declare Hidetada my successor, and do invest him with supreme authority under me," declared Ieyasu; Esyo withdrawing to convey the intelligence, to her displaced brother-in-law, with all the force and color at her tongue's end.