The cry rang out in a stentorian voice from one of the workmen in traditional livery stationed at the gate as the men pulling the rickshaws came bravely running up the sloping drive between the shrubbery, and suddenly the entrance where they awaited the bride stirred like a flock of birds rising into the air.

The wet-nurse Maki who had been suckling the baby in the distant wing of the house roused herself at the distant sounds. Softly she withdrew the arm that served as a pillow for the now sleeping Takao’s tiny head and drew her kimono together over her uncovered breast as she rose and went to the veranda. Although the baby normally never left her side, Tomo had today moved Takao together with Maki to the distant wing, lest the young bride whom one day he would learn to call Mother should be disturbed on the very night of her nuptials by an infant’s cries.

Seen from the second story of this house built on a high, gently sloping stretch of land, the sea off Shinagawa that the eye by day could take in at a glance was veiled in the evening haze of high spring, a haze that turned the green of the garden’s trees to a dark blue and left only the full-blooming cherry trees looming like great, pale mauve parasols here and there on either side of the gently sloping drive. Just now the bride’s rickshaw, preceded by that of the go-between, was winding its way beneath the umbrellas of blossom up the gentle slope. In the carriage, whose flap was drawn back, the bride sat with head deeply bowed. The elaborate hairstyle with the white bridal headdress surmounted by decorative combs and pins swayed heavily, and the scarlet of what must have been the long outer kimono with its embroidered figures stood out clearly in the gathering gloom. The light of the lanterns hanging on poles at the entrance or held in the hands of those waiting to receive her still failed to outshine the remaining daylight and glowed an apricot orange that gave a still more unearthly beauty to the bridal procession. Maki watched entranced, with a sense that she had seen it all in a dream, until a sudden thought occurred to her, the excitement shriveled, and the bride in all her finery seemed suddenly a figure of misfortune.

She must be coming with no suspicion as yet of the young master’s true nature. Maki, whose own marriage had failed, felt sorry for her. Taken on as wet-nurse for Takao when puerperal fever had claimed his mother soon after his birth more than a year previously, even the placidly unquestioning Maki had by now more or less grasped the extraordinary complexity of the situation within the Shirakawa household.