her into many difficulties, I was determined to carry out his desire. At Court she found that favours only too great were to be hers, and all the while must needs endure in secrecy the tokens of inhuman malice; till hatred had heaped upon her so heavy a load of cares that she died as it were murdered. Indeed, the love that in His wisdom He deigned to show her (or so sometimes it seems to me in the uncomprehending darkness of my heart) was crueller than indifference.’
So she spoke, till tears would let her speak no more; and now the night had come.
‘All this’ the girl answered ‘He himself has said; and further: “That thus against My will and judgment I yielded helplessly to a passion so reckless that it caused men’s eyes to blink was perhaps decreed for the very reason that our time was fated to be so short; it was the wild and vehement passion of those who are marked down for instant separation. And though I had vowed that none should suffer because of my love, yet in the end she bore upon her shoulders the heavy hatred of many who thought that for her sake they had been wronged.”
‘So again and again have I heard the Emperor speak with tears. But now the night is far spent and I must carry my message to the Palace before day comes.’
So she, weeping too, spoke as she hurried away. But the sinking moon was shining in a cloudless sky, and in the grass-clumps that shivered in the cold wind, bell-crickets tinkled their compelling cry. It was hard to leave these grass-clumps, and the quiver-bearer’s daughter, loth to ride away, recited the poem which says ‘Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow.’ The mother answered ‘Upon the thickets that teem with myriad insect voices falls the dew of a Cloud Dweller’s tears’; for the people of the Court are
