"'Tis all right, mother!" he exclaimed; "there are but thirty one. The other is a letter."
He was about to add a suggestion that Veru might have written it, but checked himself, from fear of starting another tirade against the dead woman.
"A letter!" echoed his mother, contemptuously. "Throw it in the fire! I have no patience with folk who find their tongues too short to touch friend or foe."
"But, mother," returned Gunesh, with a smile, "even thy tongue is not long enough to reach over the world."
"And wherefore should I try? I tell thee, Guneshwa, that we peasant-folk have naught to do with the world. What he can touch with his hands is a man's portion till he dies, and 'tis theft to go beyond. Writing is no good except for certificates. There is Devi Ditta's house thrown into grief, just as the boy's betrothal began, by the news of his father being killed in Burma. God knows where Burma is. Far enough, may be, to keep the news back till a more convenient time, if it came as God meant it to come. And the man is dead, anyhow."
But Gunesh Chund refolded the paper and placed it in his waistband. His friend the accountant could tell him its purport.
"The chills again?" asked his mother, with no anxiety in her voice, when, coming back from Devi Ditta's house with a throat rendered hoarse by neighbourly lamentations, she found her son huddled up under his quilt. "You must get the sahib's white powder. For a wonder, it does good."
"Quinine will not cure me, mother," he replied in a curiously muffled voice that startled the hearer by its dull despair.
"What ails thee, then, Guneshwa?"
The man sat up amid his heavy wrappings and looked at her without resentment. The ague cramped his blue fingers, and made him draw shuddering breaths through widely distended nostrils, as he sat gazing at her with wild eyes full of a mute appeal and reproach. Then, with a little, almost childish cry, he fell back among the quilts once more.