* * * * * I was musing sadly on children-widows that morning, because of a story told to me by a friend. Someone visiting a local prison was attracted by the misery of a woman who had murdered her child. He spoke to her, and she said she wished that her own life had been taken, for she loved her child, and all she had done was to right the wrong of early widowhood. “Her husband died when she was five. Do not I, who have lived a lifetime of widowhood, know what that means? Was I wrong to try to save her from misery like to mine?” In truth, apart from the written law, it is difficult to judge the woman. She loved her child, and in her own opinion did no more than pull her gently away from under the wheels of that Jagannath Car of Hindu widowhood. There was my “Dog-girl,” now just dead, poor child. What of her Mother? she who has made war upon her only daughter since her second year. What of her? There is no law to meet her case. What of her? “God has not said a word.” It is a graphic quarrel in three generations of women, and of women living in the same Palace, only a courtyard dividing each from each. Sullenly they lived, silently year in year out, not a single interest coming from the outside world to distract their attention from their hates and resentments. Traffic indeed with the world they had none. Palace walls shut them in securely, shut them in with their broodings and bemoanings, with the intrigues and loyalties of their several waiting-women, and with one gray-white _Sarus_, the red-throated, a ghost-bird, walking restlessly on his high stilts from courtyard to courtyard. I saw the solitary creature first in the cow-dust hour before the stars come out, and he seemed to me somehow the embodiment of that quarrel, the lost soul of the inharmonious.