arred his nerves and
played devil's tunes in his brain. Though he kept his eyelids severely
closed, sleep--the coveted anodyne--seemed to hover on the misty edge of
things, always just out of reach. His body was over-tired, his brain
abnormally alert. Each change of position, that was to be positively the
last, lost its virtue in the space of three minutes, till the
sheet--that was too narrow for the mattress--became ruckled into hills
and valleys and made things worse than ever. Having started like this,
he knew himself capable of keeping it up gaily till the small hours; and
to-night, of all nights----!

Even through his closed eyelids, he was still aware that his verandah
doorway framed a wide panel of moonlight--the almost incredible
moonlight of India. He had flung it open as usual and rolled up the
chick. A bedroom hermetically sealed made him feel suffocated,
imprisoned; so he must, perforce, put up with the moon; and when the
world was drowned in her radiance, sleep seemed almost a sin. But
to-night, moon or no, he craved sleep as an opium-eater craves his magic
pellets,--because he wanted to dream. It was many weeks since he last
had sight of his mother. But surely she must be near him in his
loneliness; aware, in some mysterious fashion, of the deep longing with
which he longed for sight or sense of her, to assure him that--in spite
of qualms and indecisions--he had chosen aright. Conviction grew that
directly the veil of sleep fell he would see her. It magnified his
insomnia from mere discomfort to a baffling inimical presence
withholding him from her:--till utter weariness blotted out everything;
and even as he hovered on the verge of sleep, she was there....

She was lying in her hammock under the beeches, in her apple-blossom
sari, sunlight flickering through the leaves. And he saw his own figure
moving towards her, without the least surprise, that he could see and
hear himself as another being, while still remaining inside himself.

He heard his own voice say, low and fervently, "Beloved little Mother--I
am here. Always in the battle I remembered Chitor. Now--turned out of
the battle--I have come to Chitor."

Then he was on his knees beside her; and her fingers, light as
thistledown, strayed over his hair, in the ghost of a caress that so
unfailingly stilled his excitable spirit. Without actual words, by some
miracle of interpenetration, she seemed to know all that was in his
heart--the perplexities a