THE WRECK
he began to feel at ease in her society. As their in- timacy ripened he waxed lyrical, and saw in Hemna- lini the subject of all the love-poetry that he had read. He began secretly to take pride in the fact that he was in love, and he pitied those fellow-students of his who had to study love-poems for their examinations, while to him love was a living reality.
As he reflected, he realised that in those days he had stood merely at Love's outer portals. When Kamala suddenly appeared on the scene and made the riddle of his existence an insoluble one, then only, in the swirl of opposing currents, did his love for Hemnalini take true shape and become a living thing.
Ramesh let his head fall on his hands as he pondered. Life stretched before him, a life of heart-hunger that was never to be satisfied, the life of a creature caught in a net and struggling vainly to free itself. Could he not tear the net asunder if he roused himself to a mighty effort?
He threw up his head in the heat of his resolve, and as he did so he caught sight of Kamala standing dose by him with her arms resting on the back of another cane chair. His gesture startled her. "You must have been asleep, and now I've wakened you !" she exclaimed, and was turning penitently to leave him when he called her back. "It's all right, Kamala; I wasn't asleep. Come and sit down, and I'll tell you a story."
The prospect of a story gave Kamala a thrill of delight ; she pulled her chair close up to his and nestled into it. Ramesh had decided that she must know the whole truth, but he felt that without some preparation the shock of his avowal would be too much for her; hence his invitation to her to sit down and hear a story.
"Once upon a time," he began, "there was a tribe of Rajputs and they-"
Digitized by Google
