Page:Indira and Other Stories.pdf/120

 would be a death in life. And yet, whether she were pleased or not at her father's reluctance to part with her, she was certainly puzzled. It was not the custom to keep girls unmarried at her age; even if no actual ceremony was performed, it was usual to settle the preliminaries. Why was it that her father would not even listen to proposals? One day, by an accident, she secured a clue to his reasons.

In the course of trade Dhana Das had got possession of a beautiful Chinese casket. It was bigger than such caskets usually are, and his wife used to keep her jewels in it. It happened that the merchant had had several new ornaments prepared as a present for his wife, who gave her old jewels, with the casket, to her daughter. When Hiranmayi was wrapping up her new acquisitions and pottingputting [sic] them away, she found half of a torn piece of paper in the casket.

Hiranmayi was well educated and could read. At the first glance at the paper, she was astonished to see her own name. She looked at the fragment, but could make no sense of what