Page:Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan.djvu/75

 It was past the nineteenth of the Ever-growing month of the next year [1026], but there were no tidings from her, so I wrote:

I made a journey, and passed many a moonlit night in a house beside a bamboo wood. Wind rustled its leaves and my sleep was disturbed.

In Autumn [1026] I went to live elsewhere and sent a poem:

After that time I was somehow restless and forgot about the romances. My mind became more sober and I passed many years without doing any remarkable thing. I neglected religious services and temple observances. Those fantastic ideas [of the romances] can they be realized in this world? If father could win some good position I also might enter into a much nobler life. Such unreliable hopes then occupied my daily thoughts.

At last father was appointed Governor of a Province very far in the East. Rh