ding-place, and a number of children, pale and small-eyed, dirty and
half-naked, were playing about by the roadside. I went a few paces up
the road, and stopped beside a house, a little larger than the rest,
with a rough verandah by the door. Here a middle-aged man was seated,
plaiting something out of reeds, but evidently listening for sounds
within the house, with an air half-tranquil, half-anxious; by him on a
slab stood something that looked like a drum, and a spray of azalea
flowers. While I watched, a man of a rather superior rank, with a dark
flowered jacket and a curious hat, looked out of a door which opened on
the verandah and beckoned him in; a sound of low subdued wailing came
out from the house, and I knew that my time was hard at hand. It was
strange and terrible to me at the moment to realise that my life was to
be bound up, I knew not for how long, with this remote place; but I was
conscious too of a deep excitement, as of a man about to start upon a
race on which much depends. There came a groan from the interior of the
house, and through the half-open door I could see two or three dim
figures standing round a bed in a dark and ill-furnished room. One of
the figures bent down, and I could see the face of a woman, very pale,
the eyes closed, and the lips open, her arms drawn up over her head as
in an agony of pain. Then a sudden dimness came over me, and a deadly
faintness. I stumbled through the verandah to the open door. The
darkness closed in upon me, and I knew no more.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's The Child of the Dawn, by Arthur Christopher Benson

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