ckening, soul-revolting smell inseparable
from Hindoo funeral rites. There were three pyres, low-smouldering,
close by the river-bank, and men stirred with long poles among the ashes
to make sure that the incineration started the evening before should be
complete; there was one pyre that looked as though it had been lit long
after dawn--another newly lit--and there were two pyres building.

It was those two new ones that held her attention, and finally
decided her to hold her course. She wanted to make sure. The smell of
burning--the unoutlined, only guessed-at ghastliness--would probably
have killed her courage yet, before she came close enough to really see;
but the suspicion of a greater horror drew her on, as snakes are said to
draw birds on, by merely being snakes, and with red-rimmed eyes smarting
from smoke as well as wind she pressed forward.

The ghats were deserted-looking, for the funeral rites of those who
burned were practically over until the time should come to scatter ashes
on the river-surface; only a few attendants hovered close to the fires
to prod them and occasionally throw on extra logs. Only round the
two new pyres not yet quite finished was anything approaching a crowd
assembled, and there a priest was officiously directing the laying of
the logs. It was the manner of their laying and the careful building
of a scaffold on each side of either pyre that held Rosemary
McClean's attention--called all the rebellious womanhood within her to
interfere--and drew her nearer.

Soon the priest noticed her--a cotton-skirted wraith amid the smoke--and
shouted to the guards behind; one of them answered, laughing coarsely,
and Rosemary understood enough of the dialect he used to grit her teeth
with shame and anger. The men left off building, and, directed by the
priest, came toward her in a ragged line to cut her off from closer
approach; she stood, then--examined the new pyres as carefully as she
could--walked to another vantage-point and viewed them sideways--then
turned her back.

"Oh, the brutes!" she ejaculated. There were tears in her voice, as well
as helpless anger. "There is not one devil, there are a million, and
they all live here!"

She looked back again once, trembling with an overmastering hate,
directed less at the priest who grinned back at her than at the
loathsome rite he represented. In two actual words, she cursed him.
It was the first time she had ever cursed anybody in her life, and t