Once upon a time, there lived a family that resided by the edge of a wood on the far side of a village. The family consisted of a mother, father and a beautiful young daughter. At the other end of the village, there lived another family that had a young son. The two children loved each other very much but did not tell their respective parents of their love for fear of their disapproval and objection.

Their secret love affair went on for months. The two always met each other at the girl's house at night when they finished with their daily chores.

One night, the man came over to visit his lover as usual and it started to rain. The two could hear the rain drops falling on the roof. The man thought of the clean, cool rain falling from the sky, and he wanted to have a drink of freshly collected rain water. He told his lover to bring him a bowl of rain water flowing from her gutter outside of their room.

The day before the rain came, an eagle had killed a venomous cobra for food and was carrying the bleeding half of the cobra in his mouth as he flew over their house. By some unlucky chance, the eagle accidentally dropped the cobra carcass from his beak onto the roof. When the rain came, the water washed over the serpent, mixed with the venom, and became fatal with cobra poison.

The man drank the water not suspecting anything might be wrong. A few moments later, he died from snake poison. The girl was very frightened and could not understand why her lover died so suddenly. She did not dare tell anybody, especially her parents. After the rain subsided, in the dark of night, she dragged the young man's body to the front of the road and placed him seated under a tree.

When morning came, all the villagers were surprised to see a dead man sitting along their road. Soon, the sad news made its way to his parents who knew nothing of his whereabouts the night before, nor who killed him or for what reason.

They heavily mourned their son's death and sought justice from the King. The King could not come to a verdict because nobody could give him any substantial information about what lead to the death.

The king then told one of his officers to bring the dead body to the temple, place the coffin in the mourning hall, and instructed him to stand in hiding watching who came to mourn the death. The man's family members came, his neighbors came, and his friends came. After the funeral rituals ended, they all went home.

Everyone behaved normally except one girl who lingered behind longer than the rest and kept on crying and crying and kissing the coffin. She appeared to be more emotional than the others and the death affected her the most. So the officer came out from hiding and took her to the King.

When the King asked her about the man, she told him about their secret love affair and how he died in the middle of the night upon drinking the freshly collected rain water from her roof. The King thought and thought and then told the officer to inspect the girl's roof.

Upon reaching the girl's home, the officer climbed up to look at the roof and found a dead cobra washed up by the rain water which was collected by the girl and given to her lover to drink. The officer told the King and the King rendered his explanation to the dead man's family.