_nyagrodha_ trees despaired, gazing at the curve of her waist as it sank into the outline of her heavy hips, and the swans and the elephants blushed with shame to see her walk, and the gourds swelled till they burst with jealousy, unable to rival the protuberance of those two disdainful sisters, her inimitable breasts, and the bees grew mad, as if intoxicated with honey sweeter than their own, at the fragrance that floated from the flower of her mouth. [Footnote 26: _Ekashrutadhara._ This word exhibits the opinion entertained by the Hindoos as to the close connection existing between a powerful intellect and a retentive memory. Such a quality indicates the highest kind of pundit: and it should be recollected that Saraswati is the divinity of wisdom, the pundit _par excellence_.] And then strange! just at the very moment when she turned from a child into a woman, there came over her a change, that resembled the presence of a single overhanging cloud in the ruby crystal of a clear pale dawn. For though her father told her something of her story and his own, yet he never told her all, whetting all the more her curiosity by what he did not tell, which like a hidden secret she strove to discover for herself by means of the careless hints that fell every now and then from his mouth unawares, like clues. And the thought that she was the daughter of a King flitted in her mind, and appeared to disappear continually, coming and going, as often as she sat musing in the twilight, like the bats in the shadows of the surrounding dusk. And she mixed this conviction with the rosy hope of the dawn of her own maidenhood, and with visions which she would blush like that dawn to avow even to herself, and with fictions of her own imagination that was filled with old legends and stories, and she brooded over a future that was suggested by the past till it turned into a dream, half pleasant and half melancholy for want of its unlikelihood, that haunted her, and never left her, resembling the colour of the blue shadow that hovers on the pure snow of thy father's[27] western slopes, just before the coming of the early sun. For though she was unaware of it herself, she was plunged in the loneliness of sex, arising from the dim yearning of her as yet untouched affection, and longing for the thing that every maiden waits for, like the night, in the form of a lover, to burst out suddenly into red emotion and an ecstasy of joy. And sometimes, as she sat alone dreaming, and gazing as she loved to do out into the desert, that stretched away below the hill she lived on towards the setting sun, visions of the kings and princes and lovers of her stories assembling in crowds at her own _Swayamwara_,[28] floated with indistinct and unimaginable beauty in the blue haze of the sand, with an intoxicating fascination that almost took away her breath, till she was amazed and even frightened to find her own heart furiously beating, and shaking