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cages warned him off in wrath, when he approached, and entering he saw within the queen afflicted with wrath: with her downcast lotus-like face supported on the palm of her left hand, with tear-drops falling like transparent pearls. And she was repeating, with accents charming on account of her broken speech, in a voice interrupted with sobs, shewing her gleaming teeth, tins fragment of a Prákrit song . " If you cannot endure separation, you must cheerfully abandon anger. If you can in your heart endure separation, then you must increase your wrath. Perceiving this clearly, remain pledged to one or the other; if you take your stand on both, you will fall between two stools." And when the king saw her in this state, lovely even in tears, he approached her bashfully and timidly. And embracing her, though she kept her face averted, he set himself to propitiate her with respectful words tender with love. And when her retinue signified her scorn with ambiguous hints, he fell at her feet, blaming himself as an offender. Then she clung to the neck of the king, and was reconciled to him, bedewing him with the tears that flowed on account of that very annoyance. And he, delighted, spent the day with his beloved, whose anger had been exchanged for good-will, and slept there at night.
But in the night he saw in a dream his necklace suddenly taken from his neck, and his crest-jewel snatched from his head, by a deformed woman. Then he saw a Vetála, with a body made up of the limbs of many animals, and when the Vetála wrestled with him, he hurled him to earth. And when the king sat on the Vetála's back, the demon flew up with him through the air, like a bird, and threw him into the sea. Then, after he had with difficulty struggled to the shore, he saw that the necklace was replaced on his neck, and the crest-jewel on his head. When the king had seen this, he woke up, and in the morning he asked a Buddhist mendicant, who had come to visit him as an old friend, the meaning of the dream. And the mendicant answered clearly— " I do not wish to say what is unpleasant, but how can I help telling you when 1 am asked ? The fact that you saw your necklace and crest-jevel taken away, means that you will be separated from your wife and from your son. And the fact that, after you had escaped from the sea, you found them again, means that you will be reunited with them, when your calamity comes to an end." Then the king said, " I have not a son as yet, let him be born first." Then the king heard from a reciter of the Rámáyana, who visited his palace, how king Dasaratha endured hardship to obtain a son; and so there arose in his mind anxiety about obtaining a son, and the mendicant having departed, the king Kanakavarsha spent that day in despondency.
And at night, as he was lying alone and sleepless upon his bed, he saw a woman enter without opening the door She was modest and gentle of
