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. . ." 



