there for us?"

Again he unfolded the jacket.

"A child."

The naked mite lay very still, the breath weakly fluttered. A somewhat
nauseous gift, the girl raised her arms and received it gently, without
haste,--the saffron body appearing yet more squalid against the
Palladian whiteness of her tunic, plain and cool as drapery in marble.

"It may live," she said. "We'll do what we can." And followed by the
black-trousered woman, she moved quickly away to offer battle with
death. A plain, usual fact, it seemed, involving no more surprise than
repugnance. Her face had hardly altered; and yet Rudolph, for the first
time in many days, had caught the fleeting brightness of compassion.
Mere light of the eyes, a half-imagined glory, incongruous in the sharp
smell of antiseptics, it left him wondering in the cloister. He knew now
what had been missing by the river. "I was naked, and"--how ran the
lines? He turned to go, recalling in a whirl snatches of truth he had
never known since boyhood, never seen away from home.

Across a court the padre hailed him,--a tall, ungainly patriarch under
an enormous mushroom helmet of solar pith,--and walking along beside,
listened shrewdly to his narrative. They paused at the outer gate. The
padre, nodding, frowning slightly, stood at ease, all angles and loose
joints, as if relaxed by the growing heat.

Suddenly he stood erect as a grenadier.

"That lie again!" he cried. "Listen!"

The leper, without, harangued from his place apart, in a raucous voice
filled with the solitary pride of intellect.

"Well, men shall revile you," growled Dr. Earle. "He says we steal
children, to puncture their eyes for magic medicine!"

Then, heaving his wide shoulders,--

"Oh, well!" he said wearily, "thanks, anyhow. Come see us, when we're
not so busy? Good!--Look out these fellows don't fly at you."

Tired and befouled, Rudolph passed through into the torrid glare. The
leper cut short his snarling oration. But without looking at him, the
young man took the bridle from the coolie. There had been a test. He had
seen a child, and two women. And yet it was with a pang he found that
Mrs. Forrester had not waited.

CHAPTER VIII

THE HOT NIGHT

Rudolph paced his long chamber like a wolf,--a wolf in summer, with too
thick a coat. In sweat of body and heat of mind, he crossed from window
to window, unable to halt.

A faintly sour smell of parched things, oppressing the night without
breath or m