CHAPTER III.
In dream.
Slowly and silently Kapalkundala closed the door—slowly and silently she crept into the bedroom—and slowly and noiselessly she laid herself down on the bed-stead. Man's mind is like a boundless ocean. What man is there who can count the tumbling, rollicking waves that are whipped into fury by the storm and wind raging across its breast? Who could reckon, then, the endless waves that tossed and swelled on the storm-swept ocean-like mind of Kapalkundala?
Nabokumar did not come into the inner-appartments that night through heart-sickness. So Kapalkundala lay alone in her bed-room though sleep did never visit her eyes. She seemed to see around her, in the midst of darkness, that terrible face, surmounted by a crown of matted locks tossed up by the high wind and drenched in the rain that dribbled from it. Her mind retrospected the past events, chapter by chapter, as they happened, and dangled before her vision, the slovenly treatment she accorded to the Kapalik on the eve of her departure—the fiendish acts he used to perpetrate in the sea-side wilderness—his Bhairobi worship—and Nabokumar's bondage and she gave an involuntary start. Her thoughts flew backward again
