he core of the group of exhorters; it struck pale
gold from Laura's hair, and made glorious the buttons of the man who
beat the drum. She talked to the people in their own language; the "open
air" was designed for the people. "Kiko! Kiko!" (Why! Why!) Lindsay
heard her cry, where he stood in the shadow, on the edge of the crowd.
He looked down at a coolie woman with shrivelled breasts crouched on her
haunches upon the ground, bent with the bricks of half a century, and
back at the girl beside the torch. "Do not delay until to-morrow!" Laura
besought them. "_Kul-ka dari mut karo!_" A sensation of disgust assailed
him; he turned away. Then, in an impulse of atonement--he felt already
so responsible for her--he went back and dropped a coin into the coolie
creature's lap. But he grew more miserable as he stood, and finally
walked deliberately to a wooden bench at a distance, where he could not
hear her voice. Only the hymn pursued him; they sang presently a hymn.
In the chorus the words were distinguishable, borne in the robust
accents of Captain Sand--

"_Us ki ho tarif,
Us ki ho tarif!_"

The strange words, limping on the familiar air, made a barbarous jangle,
a discordance of a special intolerable sort.

Lindsay wondered, with a poignancy of pity, whether the coolie woman
were singing too, and found something like relief in the questionable
reflection that if she wasn't, in view of the rupee, she ought to be.

"Glory to His name!" "Glory to His name!"

His "Good evening!" when the meeting was over was a cheerful, general
salutation, and the familiarity of the sight of him was plain in the
response he got, equally general and equally cheerful. Lieutenant Da
Cruz's smile was even further significant, if he had thought of
interpreting it, and there was overt amiability in the manner in which
Ensign Sand put her hymn-books together and packed everybody, including
her husband, whose arm she took, out of the way.

"Wait for me," Laura said, to whom a Eurasian beggar made elaborate
appeal, as they moved off.

"I guess you've got company to see you home," Mrs. Sand called put, and
they did not wait. As Lindsay came closer, the East Indian paused in his
tale of the unburied wife for whom he could not afford a coffin, and
slipped away.

"The Ensign knows she oughtn't to talk like that," Laura said. Lindsay
marked with a surge of pleasure that she was flushed and seemed
perturbed.

"What she said was quite true