in the earlier days of her captivity. As we talked with her we
understood the change. When first she was taken from school the woman to
whose training her mother has committed her gave her polluting poetry to
read and learn, and she shrank from it, and would slip her Bible over
the open page and read it instead. But gradually the poetry seemed less
impossible; the atmosphere in which those vile stories grew and
flourished was all about her; as she breathed it day by day she became
accustomed to it; the sense of being stifled passed. The process of
mental acclimatisation is not yet completed, the lovely little face is
still pure and strangely innocent in its expression; but there is a
change, and it breaks the heart of the friend who loves her to see it.
"I must learn my poetry. They will be angry if I do not learn it. What
can I do?" And again, "Oh, the stories do not mean anything," said with
a downward glance, as if the child-conscience still protested. But this
was a fortnight ago. It is worse with that little girl to-day; there is
less inward revolt; and to-morrow how will it be with her?

CHAPTER XXXIV

"To Continue the Succession"

FOR to-morrow holds no hope for these children so far as our power to
save them to-day is concerned. It will be remembered that we felt we
could do more for them by working quietly on our own lines than by
appealing to the law; but lately, fearing lest we were possibly doing
the law an injustice by taking it for granted that it was powerless to
help us, we carefully gathered all the evidence we could about three
typical children: one a child in moral danger, though not in actual
Temple danger; another the adopted child of a Temple woman; the third a
Temple woman's own child: and we submitted this evidence to a keen
Indian Christian barrister, and asked for his advice.

L., the first child he deals with, the little "dove in the cage," is in
charge of a woman of bad character, by the consent and arrangement of
her mother. The mother speaks English as well as an Englishwoman, and
her eldest son is studying for his degree in a Government college.
Although Temple service is not intended, the proposed life is such that
a similar course of training as that to which the Temple child is
subjected, is now being carried on. This is the barrister's reply to my
letter:--

"I have carefully perused the statements of the probable witnesses. L.'s
mother is not a Temple woman, and the foste