An hour had passed, and more, before the holy man’s tale, which ran back through the past seventeen years, was finished.  And when it had been told the high caste youth trembled in the ecstasy of his religion, amazed at the enlightenment thrown upon his own enigmatical life, uplifted 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 not taken it lying down, the passage of the years had not been lightened by what seemed to be a daily addition of silver threads to the jaded ash gold of her hair, and the necessity of a still more flagrant distribution upon her face of the substances she employed to camouflage the passage of old Time.