The temporary master of the house was in an unhappy frame of mind. Yet he had begun well. He rose in the morning feeling particularly virtuous. Success, he felt certain, must attend his efforts at recalling his nephew to his senses. All along he had urged a more severe treatment. The parents had been too lenient in drawing the line at the infliction of bodily pain. Even now if it had not been for the insult to the swami the mother would not have consented. Since it was the express order of the holy man she could not do otherwise than allow things to take their course; but it had been considered advisable to keep Pantulu himself in ignorance. When Sooba had performed his domestic pujah, as became the head of the family, he went to Ananda's room. The disappearance of the late occupant was a shock from which he had not recovered; and his visit to the Principal's house and the College only served to increase the disturbance of his mind. It was not so much the failure of his search as the memory of the indignities to which he had been subjected by the woman who ruled the household. Had the incidents that occurred in the housekeeper's room been witnessed by any member of his family or by a fellow caste man, they would have been magnified into serious breaches necessitating ceremonial purification. This would have entailed expenses which, not being a rich man himself, he would fain avoid. He did his best to school himself into the belief that he was mistaken; that in his confusion at finding himself in the presence of an angry woman and a sick soldier of admittedly bad temper, he imagined that he saw signs of the untouchable. After some hours of brooding he succeeded in persuading himself that he had not been within the prescribed distance of the loathsome objects. A little more concentration and he arrived at the comfortable conviction that he was altogether deceived by a too vivid imagination which had played him false. His caste had never been in jeopardy for a single moment. The disappearance of Ananda was not so easily dealt with. The fact could not be ignored. The more he thought over it, the more he came to look upon the escape as an insult directed against himself. He was the master of the house in his brother's absence. It was a piece of gross impertinence for any member of the family to leave without permission. It was setting at naught his authority and treating him with contempt. The more he contemplated the incidents of the last twenty-four hours, the greater grew the conviction that there must be a reckoning with some one. Properly speaking it should be Ananda himself, for he was the origin of all that had occurred, including the disrespect experienced in Dr. Wenaston's house; but his nephew's absence precluded any possibility of settling with him in person.