Thus convinced and resigned, sleep, peaceful and converting, brought in its round at waking a hope that held hitherto only in the making. Now she could look out upon the world with a freedom that brooked no questioning: the very clouds themselves seemed fraught with a charity that she had believed the part and the due of man alone. No longer need she concern herself about sin; the blood of a savior had atoned that: Buddha made it plain that knowledge is the way, and men, inspired no doubt, had built a temple, sacredly ruled at the door. She had, only, to proceed thither, and pray. Yodogima really held fast at heart a true conversion; the same ideal shone as brightly as before; only the means had shifted; let them smite; she should turn the other cheek. And they did strike. Long before Hideyoshi had tried out or finished his advantage, Oyea clandestinely entered the temple and there counselled the keeper--she had known him for a long time, and designed better than he knew or Yodogima anticipated. The morning wended brightly, and the confiding princess, departing tenderly the vain, mute welcomings of an ardently-inclined, hard-accepted husband, trod expectantly toward the selfsame edifice, devised and made in the name of One who consoles, be it man or his cold-striven image. Two lions carved in stone stood sentinel at either side the entrance. These Yodogima contemplated in the light of a new understanding, born not of tradition, but of faith proclaimed and knowledge derived. She stood there in the footprints of an enforced progression, and must no longer question dogma, though God be greater. Then she turned toward the gate, frosted with antiquity and jealous of its passage--a receptacle midway standing glaringly reminded her of a duty that fortunately she had remembered: Yodogima, too, cast her bread upon the waters, and passed on, that others might feast as she did penance. Intercepted now by grated screens, warning her that she must ask and it shall be given, Yodogima looked and there beheld an image, a true likeness of what she all her life had painted sublime. Neither male nor female, but of wood, carved in lines more symmetrical than reality had effected, lacquered of gold finer than the wants of ordinary man had ever acclaimed, these surrounded with safeguards seemingly beyond human invasion, guarded on either side by emblems without either beginning or ending, all surmounted in a halo that two burning pots of incense ceaselessly wafted thither, this Yodogima, a penitent, believed with the spirit of one who would suffer no transgression to stay or hinder any fulfilment that her God might elect, and clapping her hands as inwardly decreed and outwardly expressed through time hoary invoked a passage no less distant or angelic than others perhaps as discerning or more plastic, of ages recurring and lands apart, had sought or denied in the lesser stranding of a course no more divinely conceived.