temple far away: and thou, her guilty lover, fall again into another
birth, and be separated from thy guilty love. Then being besought by us,
to fix some period to the curse, he said again: When ye two shall meet
again, and thy husband in his curiosity shall touch thee with his
finger, she shall regain her woman's state, and be as she was before.
And now all this has come about, exactly as he said. And I have found
thee once again, only to find alas! alas! that thou hast left thy heart
behind thee in that old delicious birth.

[11] In Sanskrit, hunting and wooing can be mixed up
together by plays on words.

[12] An emperor. Hindoo idols are dressed and undressed,
like dolls, by their officiating priests.

[13] She means, he was her Creator.

[14] The Hindoos have no word, because they have not the
idea, of an _idol_. They call it a _god_ or an _image_. Our
word _idol_ implies the antagonism to paganism involved in
Christianity, and no two books are more alike than S.
Augustine's _City of God_ and Ward's _Hindoo Mythology_.

V.

So as he listened, Aja's soul was filled as it were with a mingled
essence of wonder and irresolution and sheeny beauty and singing sound.
For the tone of her voice was like a lute, and before his eyes hovered a
picture of waving arms and witching curves, out of which her dreamy
eyes, from which he could not take his own, seemed as it were to speak
to him of love reproachful and old regret. And all at once, with a
violent effort, he roused himself as if from sleep with open eyes. And
he shifted his sword to the other hand, and passed his right across his
brow. And he said, in some confusion: O thou strange and sweet-tongued
woman, certain this much is, that I am filled by thee with emotion that
I do not understand. And yet I know not what to think, or even say. For
even apart from the promptings of a former birth, thy beauty and thy
haunting voice, which I seem as it were to have heard before, are quite
sufficient to rouse emotion even in a stone, much more in a man of flesh
and blood.

Then she shook her head sadly, looking at him with glistening eyes; and
she said, with a smile of ineffable sweetness: Ah! this is as I thought,
and the instinct of thy former birth is clouded over and effaced, by
thy meeting with this other woman in the morning of this very day. Alas!
how small, how very small, the interval of space and time that divides
the paradise