Lives of Alcyone

The child honestly tried to appreciate a life of incessant prayer
and semi-starvation, but found it difficult, and sometimes yearned to
be without a mission, just found it difficult, and sometimes yearned
to be without a mission, just like ordinary children. At other times,
however, she quite believed her father’ s prophesies and entered
into his enthusiasm, and there were occasions on which she was
psychically sensitive and had gorgeous visions, and for the time
those seemed to make up for every-thing. Still she was physically
weak; and when she was about seventeen, during a seven days fast
she caught fever and died. Her father was sorry, but I think even
more indignant at the failure of his prophesies.
A curious little life, this, bearing no visible relation to those
which preceded and followed it. it must have worked out a good deal
of bad karma, but its principal use was probably as stop-gap. A
period of nearly a thousand years had passed since the last life, and
as that last life was not in any way highly distinguished, it may well
be that the spiritual force generated could not readily be extended to
cover a longer time. She was needed in Kathiawar three hundred
years later to meet the group to which she belongs, and this quaint
little intermediate incarnation, with the heaven-life which it earned,
just carried her over to the required time. Her relations with the
astrologer-father were probably the conclusion of some piece of
karma, for they have not come into contact since; nor will they in this
life, as the astrologer passed away from among us before
Alcyone’ s birth.