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CHAPTER XVI

Night had fallen before all the letters were despatched. Ramesh retired to rest but he could not sleep. His thoughts flowed in two currents, one dear and one tur- bid, like the confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna. The two streams mingled and disturbed his rest. For some time he tossed from side to side, then suddenly he threw off his coverings and got up.

He crossed to the window and looked out. The houses on one side of the lane were in deep shadow, while those on the other side stood out sharply outlined in the bright moonlight. Ramesh stood wrapped in silent thought. Casting off the trammels of his mate- rial environment with all its strife and uncertainty, his innermost being seemed to float away into the bound- less cosmos where all is eternal, peaceful, and uni- versal.

In a vision he saw birth and death, toil and rest, beginning and ending, for ever issuing, to the ineffable rhythm of super-terrestrial music, on to the stage of the finite from the silent and illimitable behind the scenes; and from that infinite in which there is neither light nor darkness Ramesh beheld the twin loves of man and woman emerge into the starlight of this world.

Slowly Ramesh climbed to the roof. His eyes turned to Annada Babu's house. Not a sound dis- turbed the stillness. The moonlight and the shadows had woven a pattern on the wall of the house, under the eaves, in the interstices of the doors and windows, and on the roughcast of the roof. How marvellous it

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