my so long life, and disciples not a few. But to
none among men, if so be thou art woman-born, has my heart gone out as
it has to thee--thoughtful, wise, and courteous; but something of a
small imp.'

'And I have never seen such a priest as thou.' Kim considered the
benevolent yellow face wrinkle by wrinkle. 'It is less than three days
since we took the road together, and it is as though it were a hundred
years.'

'Perhaps in a former life it was permitted that I should have rendered
thee some service. Maybe'--he smiled--'I freed thee from a trap; or,
having caught thee on a hook in the days when I was not enlightened,
cast thee back into the river.'

'Maybe,' said Kim quietly. He had heard this sort of speculation again
and again, from the mouths of many whom the English would not consider
imaginative. 'Now, as regards that woman in the bullock-cart. I think
she needs a second son for her daughter.'

'That is no part of the Way,' sighed the lama. 'But at least she is
from the Hills. Ah, the Hills, and the snow of the Hills!'

He rose and stalked to the cart. Kim would have given his ears to come
too, but the lama did not invite him; and the few words he caught were
in an unknown tongue, for they spoke some common speech of the
mountains. The woman seemed to ask questions which the lama turned
over in his mind before answering. Now and again he heard the singsong
cadence of a Chinese quotation. It was a strange picture that Kim
watched between drooped eyelids. The lama, very straight and erect,
the deep folds of his yellow clothing slashed with black in the light
of the parao fires precisely as a knotted tree-trunk is slashed with
the shadows of the low sun, addressed a tinsel and lacquered ruth which
burned like a many-coloured jewel in the same uncertain light. The
patterns on the gold-worked curtains ran up and down, melting and
reforming as the folds shook and quivered to the night wind; and when
the talk grew more earnest the jewelled forefinger snapped out little
sparks of light between the embroideries. Behind the cart was a wall
of uncertain darkness speckled with little flames and alive with
half-caught forms and faces and shadows. The voices of early evening
had settled down to one soothing hum whose deepest note was the steady
chumping of the bullocks above their chopped straw, and whose highest
was the tinkle of a Bengali dancing-girl's sitar. Most men had eaten
and pulled deep at the