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Srikanta vital impulse, began to beat violently in my heart. I could not utter a word. He whose memory I had been carrying like a hidden treasure, whose companionship I longed for with a passionate yearning, whom nevertheless I secretly dreaded to meet, he had flashed unexpectedly on my eyes and now asked me to sit near him. I went, but I could not find a word to say.

'Didn't you get a terrible drubbing, Srikanta,' asked Indra, 'after you returned the other day? I really shouldn't have taken you out: I feel very sorry for it now.'

'No,' I replied, shaking my head, 'I didn't get any drubbing at all.'

'You didn't?' said Indra, evidently pleased. 'Look here, Srikanta, when you left me I prayed—I prayed to Mother Kali—that nobody should beat you. Kali is a great goddess: if you pray to her, nobody will ever be able to beat you.' And he put down his rod and joining his palms together touched his forehead with them, as a grateful obeisance to the invisible goddess. Putting a bait on the hook and flinging it into the water, he said, 'I never thought that you would get ill; if I had, I wouldn't have let the illness come.'

'What would you have done?' I asked solemnly.

'Nothing,' he said. 'I would have just plucked a red jaba flower and placed it on Kali's feet. Whatever you pray for when you offer a flower, you get. Everyone knows that. Don't you?'

'Aren't you ever taken ill?'