ruddin Khan, as he was, the comparative benefits of Catholic and
Mohammedan fasting. It would be easy to magnify what Stephen did in that
interruption of the considerate hearing he was giving to Amiruddin. The
ticca-gharry ponies were almost spent, and any resolute hand could
have impelled them away from the carriage-pole with which the roans
threatened to impale their wretched sides. The front wheel, however,
made him heroic, going off at a tangent into a cloth merchant's shop,
and precipitating a crash while he still clung to the reins. The door
flew open on the under side, and Hilda fell through, grasping at the
dust of the road; while the driver, discovering that his seat was no
longer horizontal, entered suddenly upon sobriety, and clamoured with
tears that the cloth-merchant should restore his wheel--was he not a
poor man? Hilda, struggling with her hat-pins, felt her dress brushed by
various lean hands of the bazar, and observed herself the central figure
in yet another situation. When she was in a condition to see, she saw
Arnold soothing the ponies; Amiruddin, before the vague possibility of
police complication having slipped away. Stephen had believed the gharry
empty. The sight of her, in her disordered draperies, was a revelation
and a reproach.

"Is it possible!" he exclaimed, and was beside her. "You are not hurt?"

"Only scraped, thanks. I am lucky to get off with this." She held up her
right palm, broadly abraded round the base, where her hand had struck
the road. Arnold took it delicately in his own thin fingers to examine
it; an infinity of contrast rested in the touch. He looked at it with
anxiety so obviously deep and troubled, that Hilda silently smiled.
She who had been battered, as she said, twice round the world, found it
disproportionate.

"It's the merest scratch," she said, grave again to meet his glance.

"Indeed, I fear not." The priest made a solicitous bandage with his
handkerchief, while the circle about them solidified. "It is quite
unpleasantly deep. You must let me take you at once to the nearest
chemist's and get it properly washed and dressed, or it may give you a
vast amount of trouble--but I am walking."

"I will walk too," Hilda said readily. "I should prefer it, truly." With
her undamaged hand she produced a rupee from her pocket, where a few
coins chinked casually, looked at it, and groped for another. "I really
can't afford any more," she said. "He can get his wheel mended