nd speculating; a native
policeman, staring also, gave them sharp orders to disperse, and they
said to him, "Peace, brother." To each other they said, "Behold, the
driver is a 'mut-wallah,'" (or drunken person); and presently, as the
thing whirled further up the emptied perspective, "Lo! the syce has
fallen." The driver was certainly very drunk; his whip circled
perpetually above his head; the syce clinging behind was stiff with
terror, and fell off like a bundle of rags. Inside, Hilda Howe, with a
hand in the strap at each side and her feet against the opposite seat,
swayed violently, and waited for what might happen, breathing short.
Whenever the gharry thrashed over the tram-lines, she closed her eyes.
There was a point near Cornwallis street where she saw the off front
wheel make sickeningly queer revolutions; and another, electrically
close, when two tossing roan heads with pink noses appeared in a gate to
the left, heading smartly out, all unawares, at precisely right angles
to her own derelict equipage. That was the juncture of the Reverend
Stephen Arnold's interference, walking and discussing with Amiruddin
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 clash 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 bazaar, 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 possibility of vague 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.

[Footnote 4: Clerks.]

[Footnote 5: Small dealers.]