This brief dramatic passage is the more thrilling for its sudden and unusually swift movement. The goldsmith had, in fact, stolen the queen's anklet which was sent him to repair. When he examines Kannaki's anklet, "embossed with shining gold and inset with rubies and diamonds of the finest quality" almost exactly resembling that which he had stolen from the queen, he immediately devises a cunning plot. Telling Kovalan to wait till his return, he hastened to the palace and had the good luck to find the king about to enter the queen's apartments and eager to pacify her after a recent fit of jealousy. The recovered anklet was just the thing. Of course it was because Kovalan's hour had struck that the king was so easily convinced by the goldsmith's tale, and that he ordered the city watchmen to execute the thief out of hand, if found in possession of the anklet. At first those men protested that Kovalan did not look like a guilty man; but the goldsmith, by a long quotation from the thieves' scriptures, had no difficulty in persuading them that that was an additional proof of guilt, especially as a young executioner caps his stories with one about a thief dressed in blue robes and fierce as a tiger who, on a dark night in the rainy season when the village was asleep, had magically plucked his sword from his hand and magically disappeared. Immediately one of them hurls his sword at Kovalan, and Mother Earth, in extreme agony, receives his corpse.

From the moment she hears the news and discovers the body of her husband, Kannaki is as one possessed. She sets off at once for the king's palace, where the bewildered doorkeeper, rehearsing one by one the most terrifying mainfestations of the mother-goddess (Kali), decides she can be none of these, but "a human woman who seems to swell with rage.... She has lost her husband; she has in her hand an anklet of gold and she waits at the gate". The king receives her graciously and listens patiently to her charge of murder. "Divine lady, it is no injustice to put a thief to death; know that it is kingly justice." But when a rare gem, instead of the pearls that were contained in the queen's own anklet, fies out in his face, he is so stricken with horror at his failure to do justice that he falls dead from his throne. This is by no means the end of the epic, but with the self-mutilation of Kannaki, and the burning down of Madura, in consequence of her curse, we must leave Kannaki till we meet her again as the goddess Pattini in Ceylon. To another chapter also belong the many dances and musical instruments which cluster round the name of Madavi, the dancing-girl and beautiful courtesan.