THE quiet that comes before a tempest reigned for a few days in the household. Like a volcano whose pent-up energy is the more violent from long repression, it burst its bounds upon the return of the master.

Day and night they renewed the argument. Now Lord Ichigo was in firm agreement with his wife on the subject. There was no other course. Moonlight must go. Without descendants, who would there be to make the offerings and pray for their souls and those of the ancestors?

And again he was won over to his son’s side. Well, it would do no harm to wait another year. Moonlight was, as they had pointed out, still very young and healthy. There was every likelihood that she would bear children.

Lady Saito, however, had set herself stubbornly against all truce. She was determined now to be rid of the Spider. The wretched geisha-girl, she alleged, had been forced into their illustrious family through the mere passion of a boy. It was a matter of humiliation that a child should have prevailed, in such a contention, over the parents. They should have vetoed the thing at the outset. Their love for their son should have but strengthened their resolve. The main thing now was to be rid of the incubus. The law was perfectly clear upon the matter. Never a simpler case. Doubtless, it was the workings of the gods, who pitied the ancestors. Here was a great family threatened with extinction. Should a thousand illustrious and heroic ancestors then be doomed to the cruelest of fates because of a notorious Spider woman? It were better, decreed the stern-minded lady, that the family commit honorable suppuku than suffer an extinction so contemptible.

Against such a flood of bitter argument and invective the young people could turn only their tears and their prayers.

Then it seemed as if the very hand of Fate intervened to settle the matter finally. The war with Russia had begun. The effect of this news upon the Saito family was electrical. It silenced the storm of cruel innuendo and abuse. It stopped the battle of words. All saw at once that the Lord Saito Gonji could now take but one course.

Following the steps of his ancestors, he must of course be in the foremost ranks of war. It would be his duty, his hope, to give up his life for the Mikado. Therefore, before leaving for the seat of war, it would be imperative that he should leave behind him in Japan a lineal descendant.

There was no need, the parents now felt assured, to speak another word of urging. Even the young wife, of lowly stock as she was, would see the necessity now of self-sacrifice.

Dry-eyed, pale, with leaden hearts, the young people now faced each other. The family had mercifully left them alone.

She sought to entrap his gaze, but persistently, gloomily, he averted his face. The delusion which had upheld her through all these dizzy, torturing months, that the gods had chosen one so humble as she to hand down the race of heroes, had dissolved now into thin air. Alas, how slender—ah, slenderer than the imaginary web she had spun as the Spider!—had been her hold upon the all-highest!

“Gonji! My Lord Gonji!” She caught at his hand, entreating his touch. “Do not turn your head. Sp............