night lotus was wafted towards me from the garden ponds. I had raised my eyes in order again to calculate the hour from the stars, when lo! I beheld athwart the deep blue expanse of the heavens, between the black tree-tops, the softly glowing radiance of the Milky Way.
"The heavenly Gunga," I murmured involuntarily, and in a moment it was as if the pressure on my breast were loosening, were rising in a warm wave within me, to pour out presently in a stream of hot tears from my eyes. It is true I had, a few hours earlier, when my whole life passed in review before me, thought of Vasitthi and the brief season of my love—but then only as of something distant and strange that seemed to be no more than a foolish dream. Now, however, I no longer thought of it all—I lived it again; I was all at once the self of the past and the self of the present, and with genuine horror did I become aware of all the difference. At that time I possessed nothing except myself and my love; and these—were they not inseparable? Now—oh what did I not possess now! Wives and children, elephants, horses, cattle, draught oxen, servants and slaves, richly filled warehouses, gold and jewels, a pleasure park and a palace the possession of which my fellow-citizens envied me—but I—where was I? As in some blighted fruit, the kernel was dried up—had disappeared—and everything had turned to empty shell!…
Like one awaking, I looked around me.
The extensive and beautifully timbered park lifting its dark tree-tops against the night sky, sown with myriads of stars and threaded by the Milky Way, and the proud hall where the alabaster lamps glowed between the pillars—these suddenly appeared to me in quite a new light. Hostile and threatening, they surrounded me like magnificently glistening vampires which had already drained
