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Rh so soon? Besides, would any sane man wrap himself in a thick chudder as you say, in this season?"

"Yes, you may be right," was the reply, "or it might be an apadevata that I have seen."

The too gave a last glance around them, without discovering, however, the timid intruder who formed the cause of their apprehension. They then walked away.

Matangini waited in the water for some minutes even after she had heard the last audible sound of their footsteps, and when she thought they had regained the mango-grove, she came out of her watery shelter and gently squeezed the water out of her sari, abandoning to it the lost chudder. Without venturing again on the dangerous foot-path above, she took her way along the edge of the water, along a bank at right angles to the one she had left, casting looks of anxious fear behind her. She knew well the foot-paths here, for though so strictly forbidden the Madhumati, she had permission to resort to this piece of water for her daily ablutions. From this bank the fair adventurer cut across a little foot-path which she knew led through a dense mass of underwood to the one that she had been compelled to desert. It was at length gained, though not without repeated misgivings of the heart. There she stood at a distance from the mango-grove and the animal which had caused