iness, with that little sword
deliberately carving out of her own beautiful flesh with her own hand
Arisuga's horrid badge of honor? She knew it so well that she limned it
in her forehead as faithfully as had the Chinese sabre in his. You could
not--no one could--have told the difference. There was a curious curve
upward at the end, and a thickened cicatrice, as if it had been
carelessly gathered up by the surgeon's needle. These she made with her
own needle.

And then for many days she lay clutching her mattress, not moving for
fear the contour of the wound might be marred.

That was a splendid morning to her--it would have been one of horror to
you--when she could crawl from the futons and know by the glass that his
wound was set forever in its place on her forehead. She did not observe
that her face was vague and shadowy; her eyes saw nothing but that. Why
should they see anything more?

Yet, and I must tell you this, she did see something else, presently, as
she looked, day after day.

The face she saw only vaguely, at first, in her weakness, as she watched
the growing into beauty of the wound, was gradually not hers. And then
it seemed that behind her own a shadow face hovered. Presently she knew
it for the face of Shijiro Arisuga. Then slowly her own face passed away
and his was there. The difference was quite clear--it was his. And in
that way she knew that the pitying gods had fully granted and completed
her a reincarnation without death, and that she was no longer Hoshiko,
but Arisuga.

Shall you be glad to know further that when she answered to the name of
Shijiro Arisuga that morning at Sendai, (on that same Miyagi Field,
where Shijiro had been decorated!) all that had been the Lady Hoshi was
no more? That she was like the rest of them--a ruffian? That she had an
oath or two, that her voice was harsh, her words which once flowed like
pleasant water few and terrible?

But she had to sing his songs, to be gay as he had been, and to be
beloved as he had been. And all these things she accomplished, even to
his songs, which fled through smiling lips--laughing, shouting
lips--over the graves within. For the woman always remained in some
subconscious fashion, and it was upon the rebellious singing of his
songs more than anything else that this latent Lady Hoshi awoke.

Yet I am certain that you will like to be told, since it must have been,
that this made no difference; she made no mistakes. That she did no