The Reconciliation 11 



her, and looked, and shrieked ; for the 

 sleeper had no face ! . . Before him, wrapped in 

 its grave-sheet only, lay the corpse of a woman, 

 a corpse so wasted that little remained save the 

 bones, and the long black tangled hair. 



Slowly, as he stood shuddering and sicken- 

 ing in the sun, the icy horror yielded to a des- 

 pair so intolerable, a pain so atrocious, that he 

 clutched at the mocking shadow of a doubt. 

 Feigning ignorance of the neighborhood, he 

 ventured to ask his way to the house in 

 which his wife had lived. 



" There is no one in that house," said the per- 

 son questioned. " It used to belong to the wife 

 of a Samurai who left the city several years ago. 

 He divorced her in order to marry another 

 woman before he went away; and she fretted 

 a great deal, and so became sick. She had no 

 relatives in Kyoto, and nobody to care for her ; 

 and she died in the autumn of the same year, 

 on the tenth day of the ninth month. . ." 



