Srikanta
III
'I FEEL so awfully sleepy, Indra. Do let us go back home.' Indra laughed softly, and there was a woman's tenderness in his voice as he said, 'Of course you feel sleepy, my boy: but I can't help it, Srikanta. We shall be a little late—I have got a lot to do yet. But why don't you lie down here and have some sleep?'
I did not need to be told a second time. I lay down, huddled together on the narrow board on which I had been sitting. But I found it impossible to fall asleep. In silence and with half-closed eyes I watched the hide-and-seek of the moonlight and the clouds in the sky. The dull monotony of the water's hiss and roar came to my ears in an unending stream. I wonder now how I could have lost myself utterly in that game of the clouds and the moon. That was hardly an age for such entrancing reveries. Perhaps, after all, as grown-ups say, neither the moon nor the clouds are so real as the mind: perhaps my mind, after passing through our wild and strange adventures, wanted just at that hour to repose, listless and weary, in the calm, unearthly beauty of the night.
About two hours must have passed in this way, though indeed I lay unconscious of the passage of time. Suddenly I felt as if the moon had dived under the clouds on my right and, after a long swim, emerged on my left.
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