r than bar-gold in the Mint--"and the widow
of a black man."

Then she sobbed and said: "But on my soul and my Mother's soul, I love
you. There shall no harm come to you, whatever happens to me."

Trejago argued with the child, and tried to soothe her, but she seemed
quite unreasonably disturbed. Nothing would satisfy her save that all
relations between them should end. He was to go away at once. And he
went. As he dropped out at the window, she kissed his forehead twice,
and he walked away wondering.

A week, and then three weeks, passed without a sign from Bisesa.
Trejago, thinking that the rupture had lasted quite long enough, went
down to Amir Nath's Gully for the fifth time in the three weeks, hoping
that his rap at the sill of the shifting grating would be answered. He
was not disappointed.

There was a young moon, and one stream of light fell down into Amir
Nath's Gully, and struck the grating, which was drawn away as he
knocked. From the black dark, Bisesa held out her arms into the
moonlight. Both hands had been cut off at the wrists, and the stumps
were nearly healed.

Then, as Bisesa bowed her head between her arms and sobbed, some one in
the room grunted like a wild beast, and something sharp--knife, sword or
spear--thrust at Trejago in his boorka. The stroke missed his body, but
cut into one of the muscles of the groin, and he limped slightly from
the wound for the rest of his days.

The grating went into its place. There was no sign whatever from inside
the house--nothing but the moonlight strip on the high wall, and the
blackness of Amir Nath's Gully behind.

The next thing Trejago remembers, after raging and shouting like a
madman between those pitiless walls, is that he found himself near the
river as the dawn was breaking, threw away his boorka and went home
bareheaded.

What the tragedy was--whether Bisesa had, in a fit of causeless despair,
told everything, or the intrigue had been discovered and she tortured
to tell, whether Durga Charan knew his name, and what became of
Bisesa--Trejago does not know to this day. Something horrible had
happened, and the thought of what it must have been comes upon Trejago
in the night now and again, and keeps him company till the morning.
One special feature of the case is that he does not know where lies the
front of Durga Charan's house. It may open on to a courtyard common to
two or more houses, or it may lie behind any one of the gates of Jitha
Megji'