On this night the slanting fish eyes of the goddess seemed to look through the doorway, and to linger upon the exquisite figure of a child dancing upon the extreme edge of the terrace between the two flights of steps.

Dancing!—­hardly that, as she stood, her body swaying slightly in the whirl of her mixed emotions, and totally unconscious of four young men who, arms entwined, stood below, watching the beauty of her body and her movements with half-shut eyes.

Her ankle-length, full muslin skirt swung this way and that, as she moved slightly from her bare, over-slender waist, which accentuated the wonder of the young bosom out of all proportion in any but an eastern maid of ten years.

Jewels flashed in her delicate nose and ears, and on her slender fingers and parted toes, for was she not on the eve of her marriage, this little maid?  Who, finding herself upon this unwonted night, alone for the first time in her life, had broken purdah, with her senses strung by days and nights of never-ceasing preparation for her marriage; during which she had been massaged by skilful, cunning hands; bathed and perfumed, forced to dance, forced to over-feed; until roused to a pitch of terrible excitement by drugs and curiosity, and the religious ecstasy of all around her, she had crept out alone, and into the temple with the teeming multitude to dance for the glory of her goddess.

Her little feet made patterns in the dust as she turned slightly, this child of ten, until her snake-like arms seemed stretched in invitation to the four pairs of burning eyes fixed upon the virgin beauty of the little body.

Who noticed in all that crowd when four pairs of hands shot up and seized her about the knees, lifting her gently down, or who, in the tumult, heard the cry smothered in the muffling cloth of a white coat in a distant shadowed corner.

And one dead body more or less in the morning, what does it signify or matter in a place which reeks of blood?

And just as this happened, and just as a dishevelled pock-marked woman stole swiftly up the temple steps, every face turned in one direction, and wave after wave of indescribable excitement swept the multitude.

And yet there was nothing, no sound, no sight to account for it; only the high priest, tall and terrible, with the face of a Roman emperor or a Jesuit, came from behind the altar and stood at the open door, looking first at the throngs and then at a mass of black cloud which, as is sometimes the way in India, had suddenly spread itself towards the east, and was slowly climbing the heavens.

CHAPTER XXXIX

  “The gods approve
  The depth, and not the tumult of the soul.”—­Wordsworth.

“What a frightful row the natives are making in the city,” was the fractious comment of one heat-distracted tourist to another through the mosquito netting which divided the two beds.