“Then,” he replied, dismounting, “I will replenish my nunnery.”

Squatting coolies sprang up and raced to hold his pony.  Others, in the shade of the wall, cackled when they saw a Son of the Red-Haired so beplastered and sopping.  A few pointed at his bundle, with grunts of sudden interest; and a leper, bearing the visage as of a stone lion defaced by time, cried something harshly.  At his words, the whole band of idlers began to chatter.

Rudolph turned to aid his companion.  She sat watching them sharply.  An uneasy light troubled the innocent blue eyes, which had not even a glance for him.

“No, I shan’t get down,” she said angrily.  “It’s just what might be—­Your little brat will bring no good to any of us.”

He flung away defiantly, strode through the gate, and calling aloud, traversed an empty compound, already heated by the new-risen sun.  A cooler fringe of veranda, or shallow cloister, lined a second court.  Two figures met him,—­the dark-eyed Miss Drake, all in white, and behind her a shuffling, grinning native woman, who carried a basin, in which permanganate of potash swam gleaming like diluted blood.

“Good-morning.”  With one droll look of amusement, the girl had understood, and regained that grave yet happy, friendly composure which had the virtue, he discovered, of being easily forgotten, to be met each time like something new.  “What have you there for us?”

Again he unfolded the jacket.

“A child.”

The naked mite lay very still, the breath weakly fluttered.  A somewhat nauseous gift, the girl raised her arms and received it gently, without haste,—­the saffron body appearing yet more squalid against the Palladian whiteness of her tunic, plain and cool as drapery in marble.

“It may live,” she said.  “We’ll do what we can.”  And followed by the black-trousered woman, she moved quickly away to offer battle with death.  A plain, usual fact, it seemed, involving no more surprise than repugnance.  Her face had hardly altered; and yet Rudolph, for the first time in many days, had caught the fleeting brightness of compassion.  Mere light of the eyes, a half-imagined glory, incongruous in the sharp smell of antiseptics, it left him wondering in the cloister.  He knew now what had been missing by the river.  “I was naked, and”—­how ran the lines?  He turned to go, recalling in a whirl snatches of truth he had never known since boyhood, never seen away from home.

Across a court the padre hailed him,—­a tall, ungainly patriarch under an enormous mushroom helmet of solar pith,—­and walking along beside, listened shrewdly to his narrative.  They paused at the outer gate.  The padre, nodding, frowning slightly, stood at ease, all angles and loose joints, as if relaxed by the growing heat.

Suddenly he stood erect as a grenadier.

“That lie again!” he cried.  “Listen!”

The leper, without, harangued from his place apart, in a raucous voice filled with the solitary pride of intellect.