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38 were her wishes concerning the Initiation ceremony. She answered: ‘I see now that, being what I am, I cannot keep the child with me without injuring its prospects. I am ready to part with it; but I still fear that amid such surroundings…’ He was very sorry for her; but all the same he ordered his clerks to search the calendar for a suitable day, and began secretly to make preparations for the child’s arrival.

To hand over her own child to another woman’s keeping was indeed a bitter trial; but she kept on repeating to herself that, for its own sake, this sacrifice must sooner or later be made. The nurse whom Genji had originally sent to Akashi would of course go to take charge of it at the palace, and the prospect of losing this lady, to whom she had long confided all her sorrows, finding in her society the one solace of her monotonous and unhappy existence, added greatly to her present distress. ‘Madam,’ the nurse would say to her, ‘I shall never forget your kindness to me ever since the day when, so unexpectedly, yet as I think not without the intervention of some kind fate, it fell to my lot to serve you. You may be sure that I shall all the while be longing to have you with me. But I shall never regard our separation as more than an expedient of the moment. In the end I am convinced that all will come right. Meanwhile, do not think that I look forward with any pleasant anticipations to a life that will take me so far from your side.’ She wept; and thus day after day was spent in sad forebodings and preparations till the twelfth month was already come.

Storms of snow and hail now made the situation at Ōi more than ever depressing and uncomfortable. It appalled the Lady of Akashi to discover what manifold varieties of suffering one can be called upon to endure at one and the same time. She now spent every moment of the day in