have been to that
fear-haunted mother, we are glad with a gladness too deep for words that
the nursery was here. For the mother heard of it. There were lions in
the path. She quietly avoided them, and through others who were willing
to help she sent her child to us. She herself would not come. She waited
a mile or so from the bungalow till the matter was concluded, then
returned to her home alone.

A week later she appeared suddenly at the bungalow. It was only to make
sure the little one was safe and well, and in order to sign a paper
saying she was wholly given to us. This done she disappeared again,
refusing speech with anyone, and for months we heard nothing of her.
Then cholera swept our countryside, and we heard she had taken it and
died. We leave her to God her Creator, who alone knows all the story of
her life: we only know enough to make us very silent. And through the
quiet we hear as it were a voice that chants a fragment from an old
hymn: "We believe that THOU shalt come to be our Judge."

CHAPTER XVIII

From the Temple of the Rock

ANOTHER little girl who came from that same Temple of the Rock has a
story very different from the other, and far more typical.

It was on a blazing day in June, when the very air, tired of being hot,
leaned heavily upon us, and we felt unequal to contest, that a cough
outside my open door announced a visitor. "Come in!" Another cough, and
I looked out and saw a shuffling form disappear round the corner of the
house. I called again, and the figure turned. It was a man who had
helped us before, but about whose _bona-fides_ we had doubts; so we
asked without much hopefulness what he had to tell us. He said he had
reason to believe a certain Temple woman known to him had a child she
meant to dedicate to the god of a Temple a day's journey distant. Then
he paused. "Do you know where she is now?" "She is on her way to the
Temple." "It would be well if she came here instead." "If that is the
Animal's desire it may be possible to bring her." "Has she gone far?
Could you overtake her?" "She is waiting outside your gate."

At such a moment it is wise to show no surprise and no anxiety. All the
burning eagerness must be covered up with coolness. But in the hour that
intervened before the woman "at the gate" could be persuaded to come
further, we quieted ourselves in the Lord our God and held on for the
little child.

At last the shuffling step and the sound of voices told u