"I can't." She was slipping from him. He felt it. "I'll think of you when you're in Agra. And when we're ready, we'll find each other, I promise it."
Before he knew, she had turned and gathered the bundles. When she reached for the lamp, suddenly her hand stopped.
"Let's leave it." She looked toward him. "Still burning." Then she reached out and brushed his lips with her fingertips one last time. He watched in dismay as she passed on through the doorway. In moments she was lost among the shadows of the orchard.
BOOK THREE
East along the Tapti River valley the land was a verdant paradise, a patchwork of mango and pipal groves and freshly turned dark earth. By mid-October the fields of cotton, corn, and sugarcane were in harvest; and in the lowlands paired buffalo strained to turn the crusted mud to readiness for broadcast sowing the grain crops of autumn: millet, wheat, and barley. The monsoon-washed roads had again grown passable, and now they were a continual procession, as mile-long caravans of corn-laden bullock carts inched ponderously west toward the shipping port of Surat.