This very plethora of wealth brought about the question with her husband. "What can we do with it?" he said one day, on receiving an unusually large gift. "We will marry you," said the wife. "Tara and I have determined upon it in our own minds; and oh, my dear honoured husband, you are not to object! We have kept this from you as yet; but if you will agree, we have found a treasure, a jewel, such as we can give to you, and be proud and thankful to see you wear." There was no circumlocution in the matter. Anunda, watching her opportunity, as a wife best knows how to do, had gone direct to the point, and, seconded by Tara, had smoothed away all difficulties and won the victory. The Shastree made but one condition--that which Moro Trimmul had expected, and for which he had provided. "I care not for wealth or for beauty," he said to his wife. "We are rich--too rich; and thou, Anunda, art more beautiful than ever; but the 'birth letter' must accord; and she must be pure and high in blood." So Anunda had told him that, as to the first, she would ask for the "birth letter," and hope it would be good; as to the second, what doubt at all? She could vouch for good birth, as good as their own, and for wealth if that were needed. Now, therefore, that the matter all hinged upon the fitness or otherwise of Radha's "birth letter," and the last link in Anunda's chain was to be completed or for ever broken, it may be conceived that she awaited her husband's decision on the subject with much anxiety. He had requested not to be disturbed while he made the examination. So Anunda and Tara waited within. The outer door of the court had been fastened as well as that of the school, and he was, as we found him at the beginning of this chapter, alone on his dais, absorbed in the contents of the document before him. "Yes," he said again aloud, "that it is strangely coincident, there can be no doubt. Again and again I have checked these formulæ, and they are right, and the abandoned calculation leads direct into my own. Ho, Tara! Anunda!" he cried, "bring my Junum Putr, quick; I need it." And Anunda took it, and, laying it before him, did not venture to stay or to speak; but she saw by the expression of his face that he was deeply interested, and she again withdrew. He opened it, that strange shadowing of his life which, with a fascination he could not resist, he had occasionally examined, yet without daring to pry into the future. Enough that he could follow the past as nearly as might be from the fallible nature of the science. Now, he laid both papers together; and his eye passed from one to another rapidly, as his chest heaved and his pulses throbbed with an excitement to which he had long been a stranger, forcing from him the exclamations of wonder which we have recorded.