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There were some flowers in my vase on the table. While she was there, the gardener brought some new flowers to put in their place. The Devotee saw him changing them.

“Is that all? ” she exclaimed. “Have you done with the flowers? Then give them to me.”

She held the flowers tenderly in the cup of her hands, and began to gaze at them with bent head. After a few moments’ silence she raised her head again, and said to me: “You never look at these flowers; therefore they become stale to you. If you would only look into them, then your reading and writing would go to the winds.”

She tied the flowers together in the end of her robe, and placed them, in an attitude of worship, on the top of her head, saying reverently: “Let me carry my God with me.”

While she did this, I felt that flowers in our rooms do not receive their due meed of loving care at our hands. When we stick them in vases, they are more like a row of naughty schoolboys standing on a form to be punished.

The Devotee came again the same evening, and sat by my feet on the terrace of the roof.

“I gave away those flowers,” she said, “as I went from house to house this morning, singing God’s name. Beni, the head man of our village, laughed at me for my devotion, and said: `Why do you waste all this devotion on Him? Don’t you know He is reviled up and down the countryside?’ Is that true, my God? Is it true that they are hard upon you?”

For a moment I shrank into myself. It was a shock to find that the stains of printers’ ink could reach so far.

The Devotee went on: “Beni imagined that he could blow out the flame of my devotion at one breath! But this is no mere tiny flame: it is a burning fire. Why do they abuse you, my God?”

I said: “Because I deserved it. I suppose in my greed I was loitering about to steal people’s hearts in secret.”

The Devotee said: “Now you see for yourself how little their hearts are worth. They are full of poison, and this will cure you of your greed.”

“When a man,” I answered, “has greed in his heart, he is always on the verge of being beaten. The greed itself supplies his enemies with poison.”

“Our merciful God,” she replied, “beats us with His own hand, and drives away all the poison. He who endures God’s beating to the end is saved.”

II.

That evening the Devotee told me the story of her life. The stars of evening rose and set behind the trees, as she went on to the end of her tale.

“My husband is very simple. Some people think that he is a simpleton; but I know that those who understand simply, understand truly. In business and household management he was able to hold his own. Because his needs were small, and his wants few, he could manage carefully on what we had. He would never meddle in other matters, nor try to understand them.

“Both my husband’s parents died before we had been married long, and we were left alone. But my husband always needed some one to be over him. I am ashamed to confess that he had a sort of reverence for me, and looked upon me as his superior. But I am sure that he could understand things better than I, though I had greater powers of talking.

“Of all the people in the world he held his Guru Thakur (spiritual master) in the highest veneration. Indeed it was not veneration merely but love; and such love as his is rare.

“Guru Thakur was younger than my husband. Oh! how beautiful he was!