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196 aroused. The charm of youth had not after all entirely deserted her, and she was intelligent. He felt inclined to prolong the interview and said laughing: ‘Now that it is all arranged I feel quite sorry that you have agreed to go. What do you feel about it?’ She felt indeed that if she were destined to enter Genji’s service at all, it would have been agreeable to find herself consigned to a rather less remote part of his household. He now recited the verse: ‘Can this one moment of farewell indeed have been the sum of all our friendship, whose separation seems now like the parting of familiar friends?’ Smiling she answered him: ‘Your chagrin, I suspect, is not that I must leave you, but springs from envy that I not you should go whither your heart is set.’ Her quickness delighted him and, whatever truth there may have been in her ironic exposure of his feelings, he was really sorry that she was going.

He sent her as far as the boundary of the City in a wheeled carriage, under the care of his most trusted personal servants, upon whom he had enjoined absolute silence concerning this affair. Among the baggage was a vast number of presents, from the Guardian Sword down to the most trifling articles such as might possibly be useful to the Lady of Akashi at this crisis; upon the young nurse too he lavished every small attention which his ingenuity could devise, determined to mitigate so far as was possible the discomfort of her long journey. It amused him to picture to himself the extravagant fuss which the old priest, at all times so comically preoccupied with his daughter’s fortunes, must be making in this latest crisis. Not but what he was himself filled with the tenderest concern for the Lady’s welfare. Above all, he must not let her feel