The forty days of seclusion being over, Veru, in her finest clothes, sat cross-legged on a string bed ready to receive company. The court-yard had been freshly swept, the brass cooking-vessels scoured and set in a row against the mud wall, where the sun smote them into retaliating rays. A few flat baskets of sweets, covered with penny-halfpenny Manchester pocket-handkerchiefs printed in the semblance of a pack of cards, stood ready for the expected guests, and Gunesh Chund's mother had been busy all the morning making a sort of furmenty in honour of the occasion; for, though she considered her labour thrown away on the birth of a girl, she would not for the world have omitted a single ceremony, and so have given colour to outside condolence. Veru herself was a delicate-looking, pretty woman of about six-and-twenty, with a broad forehead, and a thin-lipped, sensitive mouth--both of which characteristics were more blemishes than beauties in the opinion of her neighbours. Her chief defect, however, in the eyes of the stalwart, open-hearted, shrill-voiced, village women lay in a certain refined reserve, which they set down to conceit born of her pretensions to scholarship--though how any woman could be so wrong-minded as to usurp man's estate by learning to read and write passed their simple understanding. But Veru, who had lived with a rich uncle during her girlhood, had shared her cousin's desultory visits to a mission school for a year or two, and returned to her parents and marriage with a book in which she could read glibly, and a reputation for writing. She could also knit many-hued comforters in brioche stitch, and darn strips of net in divers patterns--appalling and almost incredible culture, viewed with disfavour by all save Gunesh, who was simple enough to admire it; probably because she was woman enough to admire him immensely.

The infant, to whom the name of Nihâli had been given, lay in her arms, bedizened into the semblance of a performing monkey; tight little silk trousers on the bandy legs, a tinsel-decorated muslin bodice, and a flowing veil, the size of a pocket-handkerchief, disposed over the round skull-cap where a black fringe of wool simulated hair. On this outfit Veru had spent much time and trouble, while her mother-in-law grumbled under her breath at the expense, or openly said that in her day a decent woman would have thought it shame to make such a fuss over a girl, after keeping her master waiting ten long years for a child.

There was bitter war between these two women outwardly: yet, however fiercely Veru combated the elder woman's views, in her heart of hearts she could not overcome the inherited conviction that the 

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