children, to puncture their eyes for magic medicine!"

Then, heaving his wide shoulders,--

"Oh, well!" he said wearily, "thanks, anyhow. Come see us, when we're
not so busy? Good!--Look out these fellows don't fly at you."

Tired and befouled, Rudolph passed through into the torrid glare. The
leper cut short his snarling oration. But without looking at him, the
young man took the bridle from the coolie. There had been a test. He had
seen a child, and two women. And yet it was with a pang he found that
Mrs. Forrester had not waited.



CHAPTER VIII


THE HOT NIGHT

Rudolph paced his long chamber like a wolf,--a wolf in summer, with too
thick a coat. In sweat of body and heat of mind, he crossed from window
to window, unable to halt.

A faintly sour smell of parched things, oppressing the night without
breath or motion, was like an interminable presence, irritating,
poisonous. The punkah, too, flapped incessant, and only made the lamp
gutter. Broad leaves outside shone in mockery of snow; and like snow the
stifled river lay in the moonlight, where the wet muzzles of buffaloes
glistened, floating like knots on sunken logs, or the snouts of