-god. Before him was Hoshiko, preparing the sword for its work.
About her, on the floor, was spread the pitiful evidence that she had
tried to improvise a trousseau out of her funeral garments. There was a
sheer white kimono of silk, the sleeves of which she had lengthened to
the wedding size. (Death and marriage are both white in Japan.) She had
just laid it down. It was with this--all useless now--that she had
wrapped the sword. Above her stood her mother.

"What does this mean?" demanded Arisuga, taking the sword from Hoshiko.

"My mother wishes me to die," sobbed the girl.

"And you?" asked Arisuga, savagely.

"I wish to live. To marry you, lord."

"There are no wedding garments," said the mother.

"Nor any funeral garments now!" said Arisuga, slashing them with the
sword.

"You wish my daughter for only a little while--then go!"

"That is my affair. I _take_ her!"

"O Jizo," Hoshiko whispered within herself, "I thank you! Do not let
your mercy stop! Perhaps--perhaps--O Benten!"

"You become an eta if you marry her," Hoshiko's mother was saying.

"In Japan," admitted Arisuga. "That is the way the unwise men of old
worked to prevent the marriage of etas--and so blot out the caste. But
this is China."

And now as the young soldier looked down upon the pitiful little heap at
his side, a great shame rose in his soul that he had ever thought of
marrying her for a little while, and, quite like Arisuga, he rushed in
his penitence from one extreme to the other.

"By all the eight hundred thousand gods, I will marry her for all my
lives!"

No adjuration, no promise, could be greater than that. Some men had
sworn fealty to a woman for two lives--some for three or four--and it
was said that once a man had sworn to love a great poetess for seven
lives; but no one had ever yet, so it was said, sworn his love, much
less marriage, for all his lives. Yet even this did not stop the savage
mother of Hoshiko, bent upon her daughter's honorable death rather than
her dishonorable marriage.

"How will you assure me of this?" demanded she.

"By nothing but my word," said Shijiro, with all his samurai's
haughtiness.

"Gods! Gods! How mighty and wise you are, lord!" sobbed Hoshiko, kissing
his feet.

"But you will not be satisfied to live in China. You will take her to
Japan, where both will be accursed etas," went on the implacable mother.
"You are a soldier."

"I am a soldier," answered Shijiro Arisuga. "In the ar