very now and then from
his mouth unawares, like clues. And the thought that she was the
daughter of a King flitted in her mind, and appeared to disappear
continually, coming and going, as often as she sat musing in the
twilight, like the bats in the shadows of the surrounding dusk. And she
mixed this conviction with the rosy hope of the dawn of her own
maidenhood, and with visions which she would blush like that dawn to
avow even to herself, and with fictions of her own imagination that was
filled with old legends and stories, and she brooded over a future that
was suggested by the past till it turned into a dream, half pleasant and
half melancholy for want of its unlikelihood, that haunted her, and
never left her, resembling the colour of the blue shadow that hovers on
the pure snow of thy father's[27] western slopes, just before the coming
of the early sun. For though she was unaware of it herself, she was
plunged in the loneliness of sex, arising from the dim yearning of her
as yet untouched affection, and longing for the thing that every maiden
waits for, like the night, in the form of a lover, to burst out suddenly
into red emotion and an ecstasy of joy. And sometimes, as she sat alone
dreaming, and gazing as she loved to do out into the desert, that
stretched away below the hill she lived on towards the setting sun,
visions of the kings and princes and lovers of her stories assembling in
crowds at her own _Swayamwara_,[28] floated with indistinct and
unimaginable beauty in the blue haze of the sand, with an intoxicating
fascination that almost took away her breath, till she was amazed and
even frightened to find her own heart furiously beating, and shaking
into agitation the wave of that bosom which there was nobody to see, as
if it was ashamed of her and angry with itself.

[Footnote 27: Sc. the Himalaya.]

[Footnote 28: The old epics are full of stories of these gatherings,
held to enable the daughters of Kings to choose their own husbands. The
story of the marriage in Herodotus, about which Hippocleides did not
care, is one of the few parallels in the west.]

And yet, with the exception of her father, she had never seen any man
but one, who entered into her forest life merely like one of its trees,
for she had been accustomed to see him, every now and then, ever since
she was a child. And this was a young woodman, who lived a long way off
in the wood. And he used to go hunting with her father, who had found