nt away hanging down his head, alone.

But unable to endure separation, yet unwilling to disobey Bimba, he used
to come stealthily and lie lurking in the bushes, watching, to catch
sight of Aranyani. And sometimes, seizing his opportunity, when he knew
that her father was away, he would creep out, trembling like a coward,
and speak to her. And Aranyani, displeased at him for coming to see her
without her father's knowledge or permission, and not reciprocating his
passion in the least, yet partly out of pity, and partly out of kindness
arising from recollection of his playing with her in the past, and it
may be, partly just a very little pleased with his honest admiration,
and willing to waste a little of her time in teasing him, for want of a
better lover, would sometimes talk to him a little, and laugh at him and
tell him stories, and send him away more utterly infatuated, and more
happy, and more miserable than ever, after making him promise never to
come again. And every time he promised, and went away only to return
again immediately, simply because he could not help it: dreading her
reproof every time he dared to come, yet ready for all that to risk his
life a hundred times over, only to bask once more in the nectar of the
sunshine of that reproof. For the words of the straw, promising not to
answer to the call of the amber that attracts it, are void of meaning,
and perish in the very moment of their utterance, like pictures drawn on
the surface of a running stream.

II

So, then, there came a day, when Bimba went away to hunt in the forest,
leaving Aranyani alone at home. And on that morning, she was sitting by
herself in her customary seat, on the trunk of a fallen tree, gazing,
with her chin resting on her hand, away over the desert, that lay before
her like an incarnation of the colour of vague youth-longing, ending in
a blue dream. And wholly intent on her own thoughts, she remained
sitting absolutely still, totally unconscious of all around her, as if
her soul, in imitation of what it gazed at, had become the exact mirror
of the silent desert's inarticulate and incommunicable dream. And yet,
from time to time, a smile stole into her lips of its own accord, as if
betraying against her will some sweet and secret hoard of delicious joy
within, that she strove in vain to hide. And every now and then her eyes
grew a little brighter, and there came a flush over her face, and a
little tremor ran as it were all o