As he stood, still half dazed by sleep, listening, as one does instinctively, for another shot to follow the first, a new sound distracted his attention.
Was he still asleep and dreaming? or was that really Erda Shepherd's voice, rising towards him from the sliding, unseen river?
"I will come back to you directly," it said in Urdu. The half-heard promise of the words took him by storm, making him forget the strangeness of the language. Yet even that made his bewilderment more utter. And all around him, about him, a mist--or was it a cloud, or what was it?--had sprung into being. A wreath as of smoke drifted past the wide arches of the balcony, blotting out the pale shimmer of the young moon.
The swinging lamp above his head darkened, reddened, as the dust-atoms leapt from the earth into the air, obedient to the call of that mightiest force in nature which holds the world together, and guides it on its way among the stars.
Pidar Narâyan had been right! The electrical storm had come!
But Erda had come with it. He could see her now, standing at the top of the river steps, dimmed by the dust-atoms that glittered faintly in the clouded ray of the lamp; could see her--tall, slim, white--with a red-gold ball in her hand.
So it was only a dream; he was asleep still!
The certainty of this, the knowledge that he would wake soon, made him yield to impulse, to emotion, as he would never have done otherwise. He held out his arms to the gracious vision, his voice rang with passion.
"Erda! Erda! You have come back to me!--the world's desire--my heart's desire!"
And then, suddenly, his heart a-tremble for the first time, he drew back from his own fervour almost apologetically; for the scared look of the face seen through those earth-atoms had brought it home to him that this was no dream. This was Erda Shepherd herself, the woman who was the "dearest atom of God's earth" to him. And she had come back, for what? Not to listen to his passion, anyhow.