HER NEIGHBOURS call her dark in the village-but she is a lily to my heart, yes, a lily though not fair. Light came muffled with clouds, when first I saw her in the field; her head was bare, her veil was off, her braided hair hanging loose on her neck. She may be dark as they say in the village, but I have seen her black eyes and am glad. The pulse of the air boded storm. She rushed out of the hut, when she heard her dappled cow low in dismay. For a moment she turned her large eyes to the clouds, and felt a stir of the coming rain in the sky. I stood at the corner of the ricefield,-if she noticed me, it was known only to her (and perhaps I know it). She is dark as the message of shower in summer, dark as the shade of flowering woodland; she is dark as the longing for unknown love in the wistful night of May.
SHE WENT away when the night was about to wane. My mind tried to console me by saying, 'All is vanity.' I felt angry and said, 'That unopened letter with her name on it, and this palm-leaf fan bordered with red silk by her own hands, are they not real?' The day passed, and my friend came and said to me, 'Whatever is good is true, and can never perish.' 'How do you know?' I asked impatiently; 'was not this body good which is now lost to the world?' As a fretful child hurting its own mother, I tried to wreck all the shelters that ever I had, in and about me, and cried, 'This world is treacherous.' Suddenly I felt a voice saying-'Ungrateful!' I looked out of the window, and a reproach seemed to come from the star-sprinkled night,-'You pour out into the void of my absence your faith in the truth that I came!'
