Altogether, as he sat with his arm round her, Ramanund used often to wonder helplessly if it were not all a dream. If so, it was not the calm controlled dream he had cherished as the love story suitable to a professor of mathematics. The heroine of that was to have been wise, perhaps a little sad, and Anunda was--well! it was difficult to say what she was, save absolutely entrancing in her every mood. She was like a firefly on a dark night flashing here and there brilliantly, lucidly; yet giving no clue to her own self except this--that she did not match with the exact sciences. Nor, for the matter of that, with the situation; for there were grave dangers in these nightly assignations.
In addition, their surroundings were anything but cheerful, anything but suitable to dreams. Cholera had the whole city in its grip now, and as those two had whispered of Love and Life many a soul, within earshot of a man's raised voice, had passed out of both into the grave. But Anunda never seemed to think of these things. She was the bravest and yet the timidest child alive; at least so Ramanund used to tell her fondly when she laughed at discovery, and yet trembled at the very idea of marriage.
Honestly, she would have been quite satisfied to have him as her lover only, but for the impossibility of keeping him on those terms. An impossibility because--as she told him with tears--she was only on a visit to the Brahmins downstairs and would have to return homewards when the dark month of Kâli-worship was over. And here followed one of those tales--scarcely credible to English ears--of the cold-blooded profligacy to which widows have to yield as the only means of making their lives bearable. Whereat Ramanund set his teeth and swore he would have revenge some day. Meanwhile it made him all the more determined to save her, and at the same time realise his cherished dream of defying his world by marrying a widow. Yet his boldness only had the effect of making little Anunda more timid and cautious.
"What need for names, my lord," she would say evasively when he pressed her for particulars of her past. "Is it not enough that I am of pure Brahmin race? Before Kâli, my lord need have no fears for that, and I have found favour in my lord's eyes. What, then, are the others to my lord? Let the wicked ones go."
"But if people do such things they should be punished by the law," fumed Ramanund, who, even with her arms round him, and a chaplet of chumpak blossom encircling his neck, could not quite forget that he was a schoolmaster. "You forget that we live in a new age, or perhaps you do not know it. That is one of the things I must teach you, sweetheart, when we are married."
The slender bit of a hand which lay in his gave a queer little clasp of denial, and the close-cropped head on his shoulder stirred in a shake of incredulity.
"We cannot marry. I am a widow. It would be better--so----" and the "so" was made doubly eloquent by the quiver of content with which, yielding to the pressure of his arm, she nestled closer to him. Ramanund's brain whirled, as she had a knack of making it whirl, but he stuck to his point manfully.
"Silly child! Of course we can marry. The law does not forbid it, and that is all we have to think of. It is legal, and no one has a right to interfere. Besides, as I told you, it is quite easy. To-morrow, the darkest night of Kâli's month, is our opportunity. Every one will be wearied out by excitement"--here his face hardened and his voice rose. "Excitement! I tell you it is disgraceful that these sacrifices should be permitted. I admit they are nothing here to what they are down country, but we of the Sacred Land should set an example. The law should interfere to stop such demoralising, brutalising scenes. If we, the educated, were only allowed a voice in such matters, if we were not gagged and blindfolded from engaging in the amelioration of our native land----" he paused and pulled himself up by bending down to kiss her in Western fashion, whereat she hid her face in quick shame, for modesty is as much a matter of custom as anything else. "But I will teach you all this when we are married. To-morrow, then, in the hour before dawn, when the worshippers will be drunk with wine and blood, you will meet me on the landing--not here, child, this will be no sight for you or me then. Ah! it is horrible even to think of it; the blood, the needless, reckless----"
Again he pulled himself up and went on: "I shall have a hired carriage at the end of the alley in which we will drive to the railway station; and then, Anunda, it will only be two tickets--two railway tickets."
"Two railway tickets," echoed Anunda in muffled tones from his shoulder; "I came up in the railway from----" She paused, then added quickly: