s of
his perception of the privileges he claimed; and his ignorance of
all tongues but his own left no medium for turning him out. Qualms of
conscience, however, kept all Miss Rozario's young lady friends away,
and these also doubtless operated to detain Duff Lindsay. One does not
attend a Believers' Rally unless one's personal faith extends beyond
the lady in command of it, and one specially refrains if one's spiritual
condition is a delicate and debatable matter with her. In Wellesley
Square, later in the evening, the conditions were different. It would
not be easy to imagine a scene that suggested greater liberality of
sentiment. The moon shed her light upon it, and the palms threw fretted
shadows down. Beyond them, on four sides, lines of street-lamps shone,
and tram-drivers whistled bullock-carts off the lines, and street
pedlars lifted their cries. A torch marked the core of the group of
exhorters; it struck pale gold from Laura's hair, and made glorious the
buttons of the man who beat the drum. She talked to the people in their
own language; the "open air" was designed for the people. "Kiko! Kiko!"
(Why! Why!) Lindsay heard her cry, where he stood in the shadow, on
the edge of the crowd. He looked down at a coolie-woman with shrivelled
breasts crouched on her haunches upon the ground, bent with the toil
of half a century, and back at the girl beside the torch. "Do not
delay until to-morrow!" Laura besought them. "Kul ka dari mut karo!" A
sensation of disgust assailed him; he turned away. Then, in an impulse
of atonement--he felt already so responsible for her--he went back
and dropped a coin into the coolie creature's lap. But he grew more
miserable as he stood, and finally walked deliberately to a wooden bench
at a distance where he could not hear her voice. Only the hymn
pursued him; they sang presently a hymn. In the chorus the words were
distinguishable, borne in the robust accents of Captain Sand--

"Us ki ho tarif,
Us ki ho tarif!"

The strange words, limping on the familiar air, made a barbarous jangle,
a discordance of a specially intolerable sort.

"Glory to His name!
Glory to His name!"

Lindsay wondered, with a poignancy of pity, whether the coolie-woman
were singing too, and found something like relief in the questionable
reflection that if she wasn't, in view of the rupee, she ought to be.

His "Good-evening!" when the meeting was over, was a cheerful, general
sal