distant tune crooned in the ear of a sleepy man.  And she waved slowly her long round arms, all the while she spoke.  And she said:  Far away, over the sea, lies thy own forgotten land, and presently I will tell thee, and even show thee, where it is.  And there it was, in our former birth, that thou and I were boy and girl.  But thou wert the son of a mighty King, and I was only a Brahmani, a poor man’s daughter, and my father was an old ascetic, far below thee in everything else, but caste.  And I lived alone with my old father, in the very heart of a great forest, in a little hut of bark, over which the malati creeper grew so thick, that nothing was visible of that little hut, except its door.  And then one day I was seen by thee, standing still in that very door, with my pitcher on my head:  as thou wert passing through the wood to hunt upon thy horse.  And that moment was like a sponge, that blotted from the mind of each everything but the other’s image.  And I made of thee my deity, and forgot everything in the three great worlds, for thee alone.  And thou, that day, didst clean forget thy hunting:  or rather, the God of Love showed thee game of another kind[11], and from pursuing thou didst fall to wooing a quarry that wished for nothing so much as to be thy prey.  And we married each other that very day, which ah! thou hast all forgotten.  What! dost thou not remember how I used to meet thee every day in the little hut, when my father was away in the wood engaged in meditation?  What! hast thou really all forgotten how it was thy supreme delight to bring me garments and costly jewels, which I put on for thy amusement, thy forest-queen of the little hut?  Has thy memory cast away every vestige of reminiscence of thy old sweet love in the little hut?  So then it happened that on a day we were together, blind and drunk with each other’s presence, shut within the little hut like a pair of bees in a nectared lotus.  And I was standing like an idol, dressed like the queen of a chakrawarti[12], loaded with gold on wrists and feet, with great pearls wound about my neck; and thou wert contemplating me, thy creature[13], with intoxication, and hard indeed it was to tell, which of us two was the idol, and which was the devotee.  And as we woke up from a kiss that lasted like infinity, lo! my father stood before us.  And he said slowly:  Abandoned daughter, that hast forgot thy duty in thy passion for this King’s son, become what thou hast represented, an idol[14] of stone on the wall of a ruined temple far away:  and thou, her guilty lover, fall again into another birth, and be separated from thy guilty love.  Then being besought by us, to fix some period to the curse, he said again:  When ye two shall meet again, and thy husband in his curiosity shall touch thee with his finger, she shall regain her woman’s state, and be as she was before.  And now all this has come about, exactly as he said.  And I have found thee once again, only to find alas! alas! that thou hast left thy heart behind thee in that old delicious birth.