“Father, beloved, did I do wrong? Have you not taught me all my life that there is none like him—none?”
“My pearl, what is done is done. He cannot be resisted. It is well your heart goes with your feet. Now sleep.”
She passed in silently, and sat all night by the small cotton mattress laid on the floor. How could she sleep?
Nor was there sleep for the Pandit. Sita Bai needed little telling, for she had listened behind the curtains; and now, with a livid pallor upon her, she confronted him.
“Lord of my life, what is there to say? You know—you know!”
“I know,” he answered heavily.
Sita Bai was too dutiful a wife to reproach her husband with anything done; but his own thoughts returned to the long evenings spent in contemplating the Perfections of the God. He replied to his thought.
“Yet had she never heard his name, it had been the same. Nothing could have saved her from the temple of Jagannath.”
“Saved.” He caught the word back from his own lips in deadly fear, and added in haste: “Whom the God honours cannot set his grace aside, and there is none who would. None in heaven or earth.”
“None,” echoed the woman faintly. Then, in a whisper scarcely to be heard, “Whom Nilkant Rai chooses”—and steadily averted her eyes.