Chitra

     Alas, it is not I, not I, Arjuna!  It is the deceit of a god.
     Go, go, my hero, go.  Woo not falsehood, offer not your great
     heart to an illusion.  Go.

                               Chitra

     No, impossible.  To face that fervent gaze that almost grasps you
     like clutching hands of the hungry spirit within; to feel his
     heart struggling to break its bounds urging its passionate cry
     through the entire body—and then to send him away like a
     beggar—no, impossible.

                  Enter MADANA and VASANTA.

     Ah, god of love, what fearful flame is this with which thou hast
     enveloped me!  I burn, and I burn whatever I touch.

                               Madana

     I desire to know what happened last night.

                               Chitra

     At evening I lay down on a grassy bed strewn with the petals of
     spring flowers, and recollected the wonderful praise of my beauty
     I had heard from Arjuna;—drinking drop by drop the honey that I
     had stored during the long day.  The history of my past life like
     that of my former existences was forgotten.  I felt like a
     flower, which has but a few fleeting hours to listen to all the
     humming flatteries and whispered murmurs of the woodlands and
     then must lower its eyes from the Sky, bend its head and at a
     breath give itself up to the dust without a cry, thus ending the
     short story of a perfect moment that has neither past nor future.

                              Vasanta

     A limitless life of glory can bloom and spend itself in a
     morning.

                               Madana

     Like an endless meaning in the narrow span of a song.

                               Chitra

     The southern breeze caressed me to sleep.  From the flowering
     Malati bower overhead silent kisses dropped over my body.
     On my hair, my breast, my feet, each flower chose a bed to die
     on.  I slept.  And, suddenly in the depth of my sleep, I felt as
     if some intense eager look, like tapering fingers of flame,
     touched my slumbering body.  I started up and saw the Hermit
     standing before me.  The moon had moved to the west, peering
     through the leaves to espy this wonder of divine art wrought in a
     fragile human frame.  The air was heavy with perfume; the silence
     of the night was vocal with the chirping of crickets; the
     reflections of the trees hung motionless in the lake; and with
     his staff in his hand he stood, tall and straight and still, like
     a forest tree.  It seemed to me that I had, on opening my eyes,
     died to all realities of life and undergone a dream birth into a
     shadow land.  Shame slipped to my feet like loosened clothes.  I
     heard his