The house of Pantulu Iyer was neither cheerful nor happy. The master himself had aged visibly since the arrival of his son. The signs were to be seen in the stooping figure and listless gait. He had grown thinner, and his appetite was failing. No matter how carefully the food was prepared he refused to eat, complaining sometimes that it was not palatable; at other times he asked with a querulousness that was not habitual, how they could expect him to eat when he knew that his dearly loved son was starving. All day long he sat and moped either in the verandah of the inner courtyard, or in the front room that opened by the big door on the carriage drive. The door was kept shut and he seldom passed beyond it. If a friend came to call he refused to see him; and if any member of the family with the best intentions of amusing him attempted to talk to him, he dismissed him curtly. His gloom had a depressing effect on his wife; and for the sake of the household as well as her own she begged him to rouse himself. She suggested visits to his looms in the town and to his silk farms in the suburbs. The office books were brought, and at her direction his younger brother read aloud the carefully-kept accounts, showing how the business had increased and how the prosperity of his ventures was assured; but these and all other devices failed to rouse his interest. With the aptitude for fostering misery, a peculiarity of fatalism, he resigned himself to his circumstances and refused to make any struggle against what he believed to be the inevitable. In addition to the anxiety caused by her husband's melancholia, Gunga was further disturbed by the state of her grandson's health. At the time when Dorama let him fall from her unconscious arms he had not shown any sign of having sustained any injury. Beyond a few bruises no serious harm was apparent. At the end of a week the child complained of pains in his back and hip. He lost his activity and his good spirits; was disinclined to move and was always craving to be nursed by his mother or one of the women of the house. A prompt examination of the hip and spine by a skilled surgeon might have discovered the mischief and given relief; but skilled surgery was not obtainable from the native apothecary nor from the native doctor. A vaityan--as the Hindu medical man is called, a person without any scientific knowledge--was summoned, and he prescribed for fever. As the medicine failed to have any beneficial effect, he declared that the child was suffering from the effects of the glance of an evil eye. He must have come under its influence in some way unknown to his mother. Where had she carried him or led him?