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Srikanta the beginning noticed her trick of biting her under-lip when she was angry or annoyed. I felt that I had seen somebody, at some time or other, somewhere or other, with that particular trick, but I could not remember by any effort of my memory who had shown this trait, or where, or when. When I realized that Rajlakshmi had become Piari, I was overpowered with wonder.

Years before, in the days when I was the senior pupil in our village school, her father, a famous kulin, married again and turned her mother out of his house. The mother, with her two daughters, Suralakshmi and Rajlakshmi, returned to her parents. Rajlakshmi was then eight or nine years of age; Suralakshmi was twelve or thirteen. Rajlakshmi was very fair, but frequent attacks of malaria had made her a quaint little figure, thin and pale with scanty, copper-coloured hair. She was so afraid of a beating from me that every day she would go into the thickets of bainchi trees and make a garland of their ripe fruits for me. Sometimes I would ask her to repeat her old lessons, and if she made the slightest mistake, I would slap her to my heart's content. Rajlakshmi's only remonstrance at such times was to sit in silence biting her under-lip. She never told me how difficult it was for her to gather the ripe bainchi fruits. I had always thought that her only reason for doing it was her fear or my beating her, but now, for the first time, I wondered if there might have been another reason. . . Then she was married. It was a strange affair. Her uncle passed many sleepless nights because he could not secure suitable bridegrooms for his nieces. One day he learnt by accident that Birinchi Datta's cook, whom