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68 bring me nothing but misery; and to-day I heard something read out loud which made a deep impression upon me and convinced me that I ought not any longer to delay….’ The letter was written on sandalwood paper of Michinoku, informally but with great elegance. With it he sent the poem: ‘Because I left you in a home deep-girt with dewy sedge, with troubled mind I hear the wild winds blow from every side.’ This he said and much else beside. She cried when she read it. Her answer was written on a white slip: ‘First, when the wild wind blows, flutters the dewy web that hangs upon the wilting sedge-row in the fields.’ He smiled to himself with pleasure as he read it, noting how swiftly her hand had improved. He had written her so many letters that her writing had grown to be very like his, save that to his style she had added some touches of girlish delicacy and grace. In this as in all else she at least had not disappointed him.

It occurred to him that Kamo was not so very far off and he thought he would send a message to the Vestal Virgin. To Chūjō her maid he sent the letter: ‘That here among strangers in deep affliction I languish unconsoled, your mistress cannot know.’ To this he added a long tale of his present woes and to the Virgin herself addressed the poem: ‘Goddess Immaculate, the memory of other days has made me bold to hang this token at thy shrine!’ And to this, quoting an old song, he added the words ‘Would that like a ring upon the hand I might turn Time around till “then” was “now.” ’ He wrote on light green paper, and with the letter was a twig of the Sacred Tree festooned with fluttering tassels of white as befitted the holy place to which it was addressed. In answer the maid Chūjō wrote: ‘There is so little here to break the sameness of the long empty days that sometimes