plifted at the task before him. Yea! he trembled in the ecstasy of
his religion, forgetting that love and passion and life ran just as
riotously in his supple perfect body.

He leapt to his feet, smiting his forehead with clenched hand.

"Give me a sign, O Kali! Show me that thou art pleased!"

And he rent his garments in joy, showing the bronze breast with the
blood-red marks of his terrible religion traced upon it; then thrusting
his fingers in his ears sank to the ground and buried his head between
his knees.

A black kid, the happiest of all good omens, bleating with hunger,
tripped and stumbled from a courtyard; yet even as it found its mother
and buried its little head in the warmth of the soft side, there had
come across the plains a weird, long-drawn-out sound, fraught with
disaster to those who believe in signs.

Long and shrill it sounded and ceased; and once again--to be lost in
peals of indecent, discordant laughter.

Uncontrolled, uncontrollable, loathesome sound which tears India's
nights to shreds.

The jackals had found at dawn.

CHAPTER XIII

"A continual dripping in a very rainy day
and a contentious woman are alike."--_The Bible_.

In the late spring Leonie stood at a cottage window watching the rush
of the incoming water as she listened to her aunt's ceaseless lament,
idly wondering if both would reach high tide together, and if there
would be any chance of slipping out for a swim before bedtime.

She loved her aunt with the protective love of the very strong for the
very weak, and smilingly found excuses for the daily tirade against
fate, or ill-luck, or whatever it is weak people blame for the hopeless
knots they tie in their own particular bit of string by their haphazard
bursts of energy, or apathetic resignation to every little
stumbling-block they find in their path.

Daily, almost hourly, through the splendid North Devon winter the aunt
had wailed, and bemoaned, and fretted, driving the girl out on the
tramp for hours in the wind, and the wet, and the sun, only to return
hurriedly at the thought of the weak, hapless, helpless woman in the
cottage at Lee.

Susan Hetth complained about everything, from the lack of society to
the smallness of her income, plus a few scathing comments upon her
niece's weather-browned face and the hopeless outlook for her
matrimonial future.

Her own bid in the matrimonial market _en secondes noces_ had failed,
and though Hope had no