to the little begged school place
where her father tried to din the alphabet into a dozen low-caste
fosterlings.

"Father!" she cried, and she all but fell out of the saddle into his
arms as the tall, lean Scotsman came to the door to meet her and stood
blinking in the sunlight. "Father, I've seen another man killed! I've
had another scene with Jaimihr! I can't endure it! I--I--Oh, why did I
ever come?"

"I don't know, dear," he answered. "But you would come, wouldn't you?"

CHAPTER II

'Twixt loot and law--'tween creed and caste--
Through slough this people wallows,
To where we choose our road at last.
I choose the RIGHT! Who follows?

HEMMED in amid the stifling stench and babel of the caravansary,
secluded by the very denseness of the many-minded swarm, five other
Rajputs and Mahommed Gunga--all six, according to their turbans,
followers of Islam--discussed matters that appeared to bring them little
satisfaction.

They sat together in a dark, low-ceilinged room; its open door--it was
far too hot to close anything that admitted air--gave straight onto the
street, and the one big window opened on a courtyard, where a pair of
game-cocks fought in and out between the restless legs of horses, while
a yelling horde betted on them. On a heap of grass fodder in a corner
of the yard an all-but-naked expert in inharmony thumped a skin tom-tom
with his knuckles, while at his feet the own-blood brother to the
screech-owls wailed of hell's torments on a wind instrument.

Din--glamour--stink--incessant movement--interblended poverty and riches
rubbing shoulders--noisy self-interest side by side with introspective
revery, where stray priests nodded in among the traders,--many-peopled
India surged in miniature between the four hot walls and through the
passage to the overflowing street; changeable and unexplainable, in
ever-moving flux, but more conservative in spite of it than the very
rocks she rests on--India who is sister to Aholibah and mother of all
fascination.

In that room with the long window, low-growled, the one thin thread of
clear-sighted unselfishness was reeling out to very slight approval.
Mahommed Gunga paced the floor and kicked his toes against the walls,
as he turned at either end, until his spurs jingled, and looked with
blazing dark-brown eyes from one man to the other.

"What good ever came of listening to priests?" he asked. "All priests
are alike--ours, and theirs, and