reason, when she suddenly flung back her head.

Up through the house-top, to the stars, the heavens, rushed the terrible
cry, wailing as wails the wolf who has lost its mate, insisting as
insists one who has staked his all on one final throw, imploring as
implores the mother in the last dire throes of childbirth.

What the language was, what the words meant, to whom the prayer was
addressed, no one knew.

But at the third terrible appeal to God, or Fate, or Death, or Life, and
even as those who listened outside and those who ceased their labours in
the room stuffed their ears with their fingers and sobbed, little Jessica
opened her eyes, and smiled just as Leonie, flinging up her arms, crashed
face downwards on the floor.

CHAPTER XII

"The fix'd events of Fate's remote decrees."--_Pope_.

Vultures drowsed in the shade thrown by the crumbling, sun-cracked,
heat-stricken mud walls and houses which lined the meandering unpaved
streets, or rather passages, of a certain village in northern India;
crows were packed everywhere, taking no notice for the nonce of the
feast of filth and garbage spread invitingly around them, and in which
sprawled the disgusting, distorted bodies of somnolent water buffaloes;
inside the houses hags, matrons, maidens, and little maids slept
through the terrific heat of the noonday hours; in the distance the
Himalayas, supreme and distressing, like a ridge across eternity, lay
behind the turrets and minarets of the town which, thanks to the Indian
atmosphere and the long distance, shone white, fretted, and--well,
exactly as you can see it any day in paint at the Academy or in Bond
Street.

Perfectly motionless upon the high khaki-coloured wall, which entirely
surrounds the village, with dust upon his aged feet and raiment and
once white turban, oblivious of the heat, the flies, and everything
that slept, sat a man with age written upon every gnarled joint, and in
every crack and fissure of the parchment-like skin.

_So_ old, and _yet_ with life, and hope, and youth eternal in the dark
hawk eye which gazed unseeingly through the outer world straight
towards the mountains.

And the old body made no sign of life, even when the vultures without
sound soared majestically heavenwards, whilst the crows rose in
shrieking disordered squads, and a kite whistling melodiously swooped
from nowhere downwards across his head to the filth of the streets.

Neither did he turn his head or his e