"Thine own. Do not all women know how the Sorrowful Hour----"
Saraswati caught the withered wrist in a fierce clasp.
"Mai!" she panted; "Mai Dhunnu! Dost speak of the Sorrowful Hour to me--to me--after all these years! Is there hope--hope even yet?"
"If thou art not afraid----"
"Afraid!"
* * * * *
It was sunrise in the homestead, and a new harvest was waiting in battalions for the sickle. The jasmine fountain showered its green stems to the ground, but it was bare of blossoms. They hung in chaplets from the thatch screen beneath which, on that stifling August night, a woman had been passing through her Sorrowful Hour. In the dim dawn the little oil-lamps set about the bed flickered uncertainly in the breeze which heralds the day, and glinted now and again on the lucky knife suspended by the twist of lucky threads above the pillow. In a brazier hard by some pungent spices scattered upon charcoal sent up a clear blue line, like the last faint smoke from a funeral pyre. All that wisdom could do Dhun Devi had done, but a dead girl-baby lay between Saraswati and the harvest visible through the gap in the plaited palisade. The midwife shook her head as she peered into the unconscious face on the pillow.
"Only a girl, after all the fuss," came Maya's high, clear voice, as she sat cuddling Chujju in her soft round arms--Chujju, whom the gods had spared. "To die for a girl--for a dead girl, too--what foolishness! But 'twas her own fault. 'Tis bad enough for us young ones, and dear payment, after all, for the fun; and she had escaped all these years----"
Dhun Devi's claw-like fingers stopped the liquid flow of words.
"Go, infamous!" she whispered fiercely. "Such as thou are not mothers. Thou art Maya, the desire of the flesh. Go, lest I curse the child for thy sake."