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 anxiety at my heart, for my Baby Shubala.

They had the Doctor and Nurse of their choice, for they were very Orthodox indeed: and the Father-in-law house was most particular—the Rolls-Royce notwithstanding—that Shubala's surroundings and arrangements should be those which the oldest living generation could remember as having been used for its grandmother.

On the night of the birth, Shubala's Father-in-law sat outside Shubala's shut door, and read aloud instructions from an ancient vernacular script for the guidance of an old-fashioned Bengali dai; while the school-boy Bridegroom stood by watching the agony. "If he does not see now what women suffer, who will show him?" was their logic. He had chance enough then, God wot, Shubala's cries—the cries not of "a woman in travail," but of a child in torture and in preventable agony—pierced to one's heart.