he give me a blessing?'

'O holy man! A woman with a heart of gold gives us lodging for
the night. It is a kindly land, this land of the South. See how
we have been helped since the dawn!'

The lama bowed his head in benediction.

'To fill my cousin's younger brother's house with wastrels -' the
husband began, as he shouldered his heavy bamboo staff.

'Thy cousin's younger brother owes my father's cousin something
yet on his daughter's marriage-feast,' said the woman crisply.
'Let him put their food to that account. The yogi will beg, I
doubt not.'

'Ay, I beg for him,' said Kim, anxious only to get the lama under
shelter for the night, that he might seek Mahbub Ali's Englishman
and deliver himself of the white stallion's pedigree.

'Now,' said he, when the lama had come to an anchor in the inner
courtyard of a decent Hindu house behind the cantonments, 'I go
away for a while - to - to buy us victual in the bazar. Do not
stray abroad till I return.'

'Thou wilt return? Thou wilt surely return?' The old man caught
at his wrist. 'And thou wilt return in this very same shape? Is
it too late to look tonight for the River?'

'Too late and too dark. Be comforted. Think how far thou art on