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 and foot by your devotees in this dungeon of devotion. What avenue of escape have you left me?’

‘We have now decided,’ stated Satish, ‘that if you would go to stay with some relative all your expenses will be found.’

‘You have decided, have you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, then,—I have not!’

‘Why, how will that inconvenience you?’

‘Am I a pawn in your game, that you devotees should play me, now this way, now the other?’

Satish was struck dumb.

‘I did not come,’ continued Damini, ‘wanting to please your devotees. And I am not going away at the bidding of the lot of you, merely because I don’t happen to please you!’

Damini covered her face with her hands and burst out sobbing as she ran into her room and slammed the door.

Satish did not return to the kirtan singing. He sank down in a corner of the adjoining roof-terrace and brooded there in silence.

The sound of the breakers on the distant seashore came, wafted along the south breeze, like despairing sighs, rising up to the watching star clusters, from the very heart of the Earth.