Page:The Slave Girl of Agra.djvu/65

 Gokul Das was trying to drag his House through the mire. His lips confessed it not, but the thought came to him again and again, in the silent watches of the night, that his long life of many risks and many failures, of many struggles and many disappointments, might yet end happily if his wife's high advice was accepted, and Debipur and Birnagar were united by an act of true statesmanship.

A man who hesitates in a domestic duel is lost. Nobo Kumar wavered, and his keen-sighted wife was too clever not to see his indecision. Not a smile betrayed her inward feeling of triumph, but she secretly determined to have her way, and, if need be, to remove the scheming Gokul Das from her path like a trodden, crushed insect. "Look to the ordering of thy estates, my lord," she said to him one evening, after a heated discussion, "as befits a man! Leave to me the ordering of family concerns, which befit a woman!"

Nobo Kumar retired sulkily. His wife felt the game was in her hands.

And yet she but darkly saw the resources of Gokul Das. It was he who had brought Sirish from Debipur and placed him beside Noren; it was he who had made Saibalini the constant companion of Hemlata. A widow from her childhood, Saibalini had grown up to be a gentle and thoughtful woman, devoting her life to the comforts of those around her with that wonderful unselfishness which so often marks the widow's life in India. Demure as a nun, pious as a priestess, loving as a sister, she was, in the skilful hands of Gokul Das, the very weapon with which he wanted to work.