Even through his closed eyelids, he was still aware that his verandah doorway framed a wide panel of moonlight—­the almost incredible moonlight of India.  He had flung it open as usual and rolled up the chick.  A bedroom hermetically sealed made him feel suffocated, imprisoned; so he must, perforce, put up with the moon; and when the world was drowned in her radiance, sleep seemed almost a sin.  But to-night, moon or no, he craved sleep as an opium-eater craves his magic pellets,—­because he wanted to dream.  It was many weeks since he last had sight of his mother.  But surely she must be near him in his loneliness; aware, in some mysterious fashion, of the deep longing with which he longed for sight or sense of her, to assure him that—­in spite of qualms and indecisions—­he had chosen aright.  Conviction grew that directly the veil of sleep fell he would see her.  It magnified his insomnia from mere discomfort to a baffling inimical presence withholding him from her:—­till utter weariness blotted out everything; and even as he hovered on the verge of sleep, she was there....

She was lying in her hammock under the beeches, in her apple-blossom sari, sunlight flickering through the leaves.  And he saw his own figure moving towards her, without the least surprise, that he could see and hear himself as another being, while still remaining inside himself.

He heard his own voice say, low and fervently, “Beloved little Mother—­I am here.  Always in the battle I remembered Chitor.  Now—­turned out of the battle—­I have come to Chitor.”

Then he was on his knees beside her; and her fingers, light as thistledown, strayed over his hair, in the ghost of a caress that so unfailingly stilled his excitable spirit.  Without actual words, by some miracle of interpenetration, she seemed to know all that was in his heart—­the perplexities and indecisions; the magnetism of Home and the dread of it; the difficulty of making things clear to his father.  And the magic of her touch charmed away all inner confusions, all headache and heartache.  But when he rose impulsively, and would have taken her in his arms—­she was gone; everything was gone; ... the hammock, the beeches, the sunbeams....

He was standing alone on a moonlit plain, blotched and streaked with shadows of dak-jungle and date-palm; and rising out of it abruptly—­as he had seen it last night—­loomed the black bulk of Chitor; the sacred, solitary ghost of a city, linked with his happiest days of childhood and his mother’s heroic tales.  The great rock was scarped and bastioned, every line of it.  The walls, ruined in parts, showed ghostly shades of ruins beyond; and soaring high above all, Khumba Rana’s nine-storied Tower of Victory lifted a giant finger to the unheeding heavens.  Watching it, fascinated, trying in vain to make out details, he was startlingly beset by the strangest among many strange sensations that had visited his imaginative brain:  nothing less than a revival