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246 the part of a fond and disinterested parent. A strange delusion! For had he reflected for a moment he would have seen that nothing would ever have induced him so crudely to thrust his own daughter, the Princess of Akashi, upon a suitor’s notice. He now stole away by a back door and returned to his own apartments.

Sochi was feeling much encouraged. He now discredited Saishō’s note and imagined that the lady had been sitting during the whole time of his discourse in the position where the light of the glow-worms revealed her. ‘After all,’ he thought to himself, ‘I have interested her. She listens patiently and apparently even likes to be near me.’ And with that he pulled back the light gauze flap at the part of her curtains where Genji had removed the thick inner hanging. She was now but a few feet away from him, and though a bag of glow-worms makes no very famous illumination, he saw enough by this fitful and glimmering light to confirm his impression that she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. In another moment Tamakatsura’s maids, summoned hastily to the scene, had detached the strange lantern and carried it somewhere out of sight.

Genji’s stratagem was indeed abundantly successful. This momentary vision of Tamakatsura huddled disconsolately upon her couch had profoundly disturbed him. ‘Does the harsh world decree that even the flickering glow-worm, too shy for common speech, must quench the timid torchlight of its love!’ So he now recited; and she, thinking that if she appeared to be taking much trouble about her reply, he would suppose she attached more importance to the matter than was actually the case, answered instantly: ‘Far deeper is the glow-worm’s love that speaks in silent points of flame, than all the passions idle courtiers prate