Page:Broken Ties and Other Stories.pdf/214

 ‘Bhusan struck his forehead in despair.

‘Next day the fair broke up, and the stall-keepers and the players’ party went away. Bhusan gave orders that that night no one should sleep in the house except himself. The servants came to the conclusion that their master was going to practise some mystic rites. All that day Bhusan fasted.

‘In the evening, he took his seat at the window of that empty house. That day there were breaks in the clouds, showing the stars twinkling through the rain-washed air. The moon was late in rising, and, as the fair was over, there was not a single boat on the flooded river. The villagers, tired out by two nights’ dissipation, were sound asleep.

‘Bhusan, sitting with his head resting on the back of his chair, was gazing up at the stars. He was thinking of the time when he was only nineteen years old, and was reading in Calcutta; how in the evening he used to he in College Square, with his hands behind his head, gazing up at those eternal stars, and thinking of the sweet face of Mani in his father-in-law’s house. The very separation from her was like an instrument whose tense-drawn strings those stars used to touch and waken into song.