Long days and nights passed ere she essayed again; and then, weary and faint with home-woe, she lingered on the steps of a lofty house whose carved door was swung open, whose jasper hearthstone was heaped with goodly logs, and beside it, on the soft flower-strewn skin of a panther, slept a youth beautiful as Adonis, and in his sleep ever murmuring, "Mother!" Maya's heart yearned with a kindred pang. She, too, was orphaned in her soul, and she would gladly have lit the fire upon this lonely hearth, and companioned the solitude of the sleeper; but, alas! the boughs still wore their summer garland, and from each severed end slow tears of dryad-life distilled honeyedly upon the stone beneath. Of such withes and saplings comes no living fire! Maya, smiling, set a kiss upon the boy-sleeper's brow, but the Spark lay quiet, and the house-spirit flung a blooming cherry-bough after its departing guest. The year was now wellnigh run. The Princess Maya despaired of home. The earth seemed a harsh stepmother, and its children rather stones than clay. A vague sense of some fearful barrier between herself and her kind haunted the woman's soul within her, and the unquenchable flames of the Spark seemed to girdle her with a defence that drove away even friendly ingress. Night and day she wept, oppressed with loneliness. She knew not how to speak the tongues of men, though well she understood their significance. Only little children mated rightly with her divine infancy; only the mute glories of nature satisfied for a moment her brooding soul. The celestial impulses within her beat their wings in futile longing for freedom, and with inexpressible anguish she uttered her griefs aloud, or sung them to such plaintive strains that all who heard wept in sympathy. Yet she had no home.