“Well, men shall revile you,” growled Dr. Earle.  “He says we steal children, to puncture their eyes for magic medicine!”

Then, heaving his wide shoulders,—­

“Oh, well!” he said wearily, “thanks, anyhow.  Come see us, when we’re not so busy?  Good!—­Look out these fellows don’t fly at you.”

Tired and befouled, Rudolph passed through into the torrid glare.  The leper cut short his snarling oration.  But without looking at him, the young man took the bridle from the coolie.  There had been a test.  He had seen a child, and two women.  And yet it was with a pang he found that Mrs. Forrester had not waited.

CHAPTER VIII

THE HOT NIGHT

Rudolph paced his long chamber like a wolf,—­a wolf in summer, with too thick a coat.  In sweat of body and heat of mind, he crossed from window to window, unable to halt.

A faintly sour smell of parched things, oppressing the night without breath or motion, was like an interminable presence, irritating, poisonous.  The punkah, too, flapped incessant, and only made the lamp gutter.  Broad leaves outside shone in mockery of snow; and like snow the stifled river lay in the moonlight, where the wet muzzles of buffaloes glistened, floating like knots on sunken logs, or the snouts of crocodiles.  Birds fluttered, sleepless and wretched.  Coolies, flung asleep on the burnt grass, might have been corpses, but for the sound of their troubled breathing.

“If I could believe,” he groaned, sitting with hands thrust through his hair.  “If I believe in her—­But I came too late.”

The lamp was an added torment.  He sprang up from it, wiped the drops off his forehead, and paced again.  He came too late.  All alone.  The collar of his tunic strangled him.  He stuffed his fingers underneath, and wrenched; then as he came and went, catching sight in a mirror, was shocked to see that, in Biblical fashion, he had rent his garments.

“This is bad,” he thought, staring.  “It is the heat.  I must not stay alone.”

He shouted, clapped his hands for a servant, and at last, snatching a coat from his unruffled boy, hurried away through stillness and moonlight to the detested club.  On the stairs a song greeted him,—­a fragment with more breath than melody, in a raw bass:—­

“Jolly boating weather,
And a hay harvest breeze!”

“Shut up!” snarled another voice.  “Good God, man!”

The loft was like a cave heated by subterranean fires.  Two long punkahs flapped languidly in the darkness, with a whine of pulleys.  Under a swinging lamp, in a pool of light and heat, four men sat playing cards, their tousled heads, bare arms, and cinglets torn open across the chest, giving them the air of desperadoes.

“Jolly boating weather,” wheezed the fat Sturgeon.  He stood apart in shadow, swaying on his feet.  “What would you give,” he propounded thickly, “for a hay harvest breeze?”