“Ah!” sighed Iravati; “how can our meeting be unclouded happiness, when we are to part again so soon? Perhaps, and even probably, these are the only short moments in which, for a long time, we shall speak freely one to another; and to-morrow you depart for the luxurious, turbulent city, where a simple girl like me may easily be forgotten.”
“Forgotten!” cried Siddha; “have I deserved such suspicion from you? and what is the absence of a few months! Returns not”—asked he, in the words of Amaru, as, taking her hand in his, he drew her nearer to him—“Returns not he who departs? Why, then, beloved, art thou sad? Do not my heart and word remain yours, even though we part?”[8]
“Ah,” answered Iravati, “if poets could comfort us! But tell me, Siddha, have you never made any verses on me?”
“I wish that I could,” was the modest reply; “and indeed I have tried, but what I wrote was never worthy of you. Still, there is another art in which I am more accomplished than in poetry, and my attempt in that line you shall see.” And drawing from his girdle a small locket, set with jewels, he showed a miniature, in which she recognised her own image.
“Siddha!” she exclaimed, joyfully; “but I am not so beautiful as that.”
“Not so beautiful!” repeated he. “No; but a hundred times more beautiful than my pencil or that of any other could represent.”
And he was right, for according to Indian taste he had exaggerated the eyes and mouth, when their regularity was one of the beauties of Iravati’s face.
“But why,” said he, as she suddenly drew herself up and quickly escaped from his arms, “why are you now going to leave me?”
“Wait a moment,” she replied; “in an instant I will be back.”
With the swiftness of a gazelle he saw her taking her way through the trees to the palace, ascending the broad marble steps as though she scarcely touched them, and in a few moments return, holding in her hand an object which, in the distance, he could not distinguish, but as she drew nearer, and, with a blush, held it out to him, with an exclamation of admiration, he recognised his own portrait. But this, in truth, was an idealized likeness.