he would gladly have forgone the joys of Paradise that his ghost might linger on earth and keep her from all harm. Thus, profoundly distrusting the intention of his sons and full of the blackest forebodings, he died at last after a bitter struggle against fate, and only when his will could no longer hold out against the encroachments of sickness and old age.
For a while, with their father’s dying injunctions fresh in their ears, the step-sons treated her with at any rate superficial kindness; but this soon wore off and she began to find her position in the house exceedingly unpleasant. This no doubt lay rather in the nature of the circumstances themselves than in any particular ill-will on the part of her guardians. But she felt herself to be the object of a deliberate persecution and her life became one continual succession of tears and lamentations. The only one of the brothers who seemed to have any sympathy with her was Ki no Kami: ‘Please keep nothing back from me,’ he said. ‘My father was so anxious that I should help you and how can I, unless you entrust your secrets to me?’ Then he took to following her about. She remembered how amorous he had always been. Soon his intentions became perfectly apparent. She had suffered enough already in her life; why should she sit down and wait quietly for the fresh miseries which fate had now in store for her? Without a word to anybody she sent for her confessor and took the vows of a nun. Her waiting-women and servants were naturally aghast at this sudden step. Ki no Kami took it as a personal affront. ‘She did it simply to spite me,’ he told people; ‘but she is young yet and will soon be wondering how on earth she is going to support such an existence for the rest of her life,’—sagacity which did not impress his hearers quite as he intended.
