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THE WRECK 125

for their evening ablutions. Kamala was busy all the afternoon preparing pan, braiding her hair, washing, and changing her clothes, and the sun- had set behind the bamboo clumps that marked the sites of villages before she was ready for the evening.

As on the previous day, the steamer lay up for the night off one of its regular landing-places. Kamala had just decided that the vegetables left over from break- fast would serve for supper, and that there was not much cooking to be done, when Ramesh came and announced that he had eaten such a hearty meal at midday that he did not require any supper.

"Won't you have anything at all?" asked Kamala regretfully, "not even a little fried fish?"

"No, thank you," he replied curtly and went away, whereupon Kamala heaped the whole of the savoury mess on Umesh's plate.

"Haven't you kept any for yourself ?" he asked.

"I've had my supper" was her reply, and the labours of her little water-borne menage were over for the day.

The new moon was now spreading its radiance over stream and shore. There was no village close to the steamer-station, and the silent lustrous night seemed to be keeping vigil like a lady whose lover has not kept tryst over the soft green expanse of the rice- fields.

On a stool in the tin-roofed office on the bank sat a wizened little clerk totalling figures by the light of a kerosene lamp. Ramesh could see him through the open door. "Would that Fate" he sighed, "had set me in some groove like that clerk's — narrow but clearly defined ! What harm could come to one in such a life — writing up accounts all day, scolded by one's master when one makes mistakes, and going home at night with a day's work behind one?"

By and by the light in the office went out. The clerk wrapped his head in a shawl to keep out the night

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