From the dense yellow smoke enveloping poor little Nihâli came a feeble, gasping cry.
"Mother!" pleaded the man, hiding his face.
"'Tis the devil cries," replied the stern old woman, flinging fresh drugs on the coals.
A fainter cry came, echoed in a shriek from the door, where Veru stood, paralyzed for an instant by rage and terror. The next, dashing the witches aside with furious blows, coughing and suffocating in the fumes, her empty, craving arms sought the child and found it--too late! A sigh, a struggle, and the demon, or angel of life, had fled forever.
Smarting and half blind with the foul smoke, Veru's eyes failed to see the tall figure half hidden in the corner; but her voice seemed to pierce him through and through.
"I gave her to Guneshwa! Where is he?"
Then, as the full extent of the result came home to her, shriek after shriek rent the air, and she fell into one of the violent hysterical fits so common among Indian women of all classes.
"The devil hath entered into her," said her mother-in-law, bitterly; so the turmeric and red pepper came in handy.
Gunesh Chund, torn by a vague remorse, and uncertain what to think, found his refuge in the dream-compeller. But while he dreamed under the stars, on the roof that rose like a watch-tower above the village, and Veru lay in the unconsciousness of exhaustion below, a strange, ghastly scene was enacted in the outer court-yard, where the old women flitted about with tiny oil lamps in their hands. Little Nihâli, dressed in her fine clothes, with bandy legs straightened and struggling arms at rest, lay stiff on the string stool, with each tiny palm clenched over a ball of raw sugar, and miniature cards of cotton-wool, such as women prepare for their spinning, between each finger. So armed with all female attractions, the sugar symbolizing sweetness to a lover, the cotton diligence as a wife, Nihâli was ready, like a true woman, to sacrifice herself unconditionally in order to bring sons to the hearth.
"Veru, of course, would not hear of this," said the stern grandmother to her cronies, "and Guneshwa is fairly bewitched by her obstinacy. Nevertheless, the opportunity shall not slip; for if the omens are bad, I must give him another wife without delay."