Page:Tales of Bengal (Sita and Santa Chattopadhyay).djvu/60

Tales of Bengal by social custom, her heart had bled for a time and then had healed again and formed new ties. Every time she pictured her father's face, there arose by its side a dark young face set in a mass of black tangled hair. The back part of the house, where a water melon trails on a bamboo net-work and shoots up a thousand tendrils, was visible up to the turn of the road, and Surama looked on, her eyes fixed on that spot, as long as it remained in sight. To the last moment, she expected to see Gopal there, waving his arms and calling her back, like the naughty boy he was! But he did not come. "Ah! perhaps he is crying," thought she. "He is lying with his face on the floor, in tears." And she longed to rush back to him and wipe away those tears with a thousand kisses! But Gopal was then lost in thoughts of the Sashipur fair. "The poor darling wanted to hide his tears! That is why he would not speak or say good-bye to me." And in her mind's eye she read, in the helpless look of his large eyes, a thousand mute appeals. That single glance with which he looked up from the trunk with pouting lips, came back to her, as a silent complaint; and her eyes filled with tears.

A smiling field of maize lay before her stretching out its golden limbs amid the dust. As the cart lumbered by, she thought of another day in the month of December long gone by. That was before her marriage, when she, a little girl of ten, came to this very village with her cousin, across a field of golden corn, to see the home of her cousin's husband. One day, they went to visit the Dutt family and to see the new baby. That was the first time she saw Gopal in his mother's arms. She recalled how, as she bent down to look at the little thing, her hair, curling up her neck, hung down to its soft hands, and how,—nobody knows what it saw in her,—the baby caught her ringlets in its tiny pink hands with a ripple of laughter. Really, did he know her, even then? Who could have Rh