llsides set with swords, and valleys terrible
with fire.

"So that we be together,
Even the Hell of the Blood Lake,
Even the Mountain of Swords,
Mean nothing to us at all!"

So they had sung. So that we be together! Ah, together,--that was the
essence of it, that the key! "And this is what I want!" groaned the
suffering man. "This ghostly resignation is a self-numbing of the
heart. I care not for the ghost, the spirit, however pure. I want the
wife I have lost,--her smile, her voice, her little hands to touch me!
Oh, Ume-ko, my wife, my wife!" If, as the abbot said, this phase of
grief were bestial, were unworthy of the woman who had died for him,
then why did not the listening soul of her shrink? He knew that it was
not repelled, whatever the frenzy of his grief. Indeed, at such times
of agony she leaned down closer, longing to comfort him. If it were
given her to speak she would have cried, "My husband!" Wherever she
might drift,--in the black ocean, in the Meido-land, yes, even in the
smile of Buddha on his throne,--she yearned for her lover as he for
her, with a human love; she stretched out arms of mist to him, and
tinged the pale ether of the spirit world with love's rosy flame.

One such night, during the time of plum-tree falling, when the boy,
tortured by the almost human sweetness of the flowers, had risen from
his bed to flee memory across the wide, cold plains of night, he had
left, in his hurried going, the doors and shutters of his room spread
wide. Mata and old Kano, accustomed to these midnight sounds, merely
turned on their lacquered pillows, murmured "Poor tormented Tatsu," and
went to sleep again. It had been a day of power for the young artist,
but not a day of peace. The picture he had worked on he would have
called one of his "nightmare fancies." It showed a slender form in
gray with one arm about a willow. She and the tree both leaned above
swift, flowing water, and her eyes were fixed in sombre brooding. On
the bank, in abrupt foreshortening, lay the figure of a man. He looked
at her. From the river, unmarked as yet by either, rose the gray face
and long, red hair of a Kappa, or malicious river sprite. This sketch,
unfinished, for the Kappa was a mere indication of red locks and a
tall, thin form, stood against a pillar of the tokonoma at just the
angle where the soft light of the butsu-dan shed a pale glow across it.
Brushes, paints, and various small saucers