vacant look. It drove me to fury; I made a penetrating look to demand a quick answer. He felt unnerved, coughed long, and with utmost pain cleared his voice, fumbling for words. Each time he attempted to utter some words, a curious phenomenon took possession of him in the very source, baffling his spirit. Restless, I jerked the drooping shoulders of the poor old man, minutes together... He burst out with a scream-so heart-breaking! And lazily, he dropped down on the floor. The sound of his scream reverberated in the entire house for some tinie and receded far into the cold, condensed air, outside....
Now I could sufficiently gather that my mother had passed away. After a brief moment, my old servant added that she died of a sudden heart attack.
A dead silence coagulated the fleeting moments; and defiled the sequence of my residuum of thoughts. I stood aberrated and collapsed on the sofa.
As I was rolling my eyes around the room, a portrait of my mother hanging on the wall discovered my absent look. I strained my eyes to look at it more distinctly. There she was suspended with her baby in her lap, eyes fixed at me, as if to impart and implore something to me eagerly. I kept gazing at the picture-a dead mother and a living son!
* * * * * *
I plunged in thought—lost myself in it, for moments of utter monotony....
I recovered : Tears trickled down my eyes, warm drops that made me warmer still.
My wife was stunned, looking at me constantly to share with me, my grief, my thought, my feeling! my new wife, new to this house, a poor woman, to face the hell of seclusion and the famine of sorrow!
* * * * * *
The baby made a moaning sound, as though, a suggestive of maintaining calm and tranquillity....
