“Come again next year. We will be waiting to welcome you!”
The crowd scattered, and with satisfied faces, made their way homeward.
Mother and I walked happily along, with Ishi, Toshi, and Jiya chatting pleasantly behind us. The anxious look that Mother’s face had lost during the last few days did nor come back, and I felt that Father had really been with us bringing comfort and help to us all; and now he had gone, leaving behind him, not loneliness, but peace.
That afternoon, as Ishi was putting away my flower hair-ornament, she pointed to the shield of polished silver set in the midst of the flowers. A crest was carved deeply in it, and the cut edges sparkled like jewels.
“It is not the Inagaki crest,” I said.
“No, it is the birth crest of Honourable Yedo Grandmother,” said she, closing the little box and putting it away. “It is very wonderful work. Everything Honourable Yedo Grandmother has ever given you is especially beautiful or rare.”
“Honourable Yedo Grandmother never sends a gift to my father or to my mother,” I said.
“No. To no one but you,” Ishi replied. “She always remembers you on the festival to welcome and honour the ancestors of the Inagaki.”
I remembered long afterward that a faint wonder passed through my mind at that time that I should be the one member of the family who ever received a gift from Honourable Yedo Grandmother, but it lasted only a moment. A Japanese child rarely asked what was not told, and there were so many taken-for-granted things in Japanese life, anyway, that I gave the matter no further thought.
Not until I was grown did I learn that Honourable Yedo Grandmother was my father’s own mother, and that my
