Yes! sacrifice of the woman he loved that his god might be twice pleased.

He was crazed with the delirium of his religion, mad with the call of the senses lashed to frenzy by the restraint which had been unnaturally forced upon him throughout his life; his eyes had the look of the eyes of those gods who spy down upon you from the shadowy corners of India’s temples, and his nostrils dilated as he touched the dagger in her hand.

Only for a moment!  For even as he touched it the single beat of a drum fell heavily upon the air, causing him to sit back on his heels with a smile upon the full curved lips, and a light of sudden understanding in his eyes.

There was more toward than a mere sacrifice!

The Holy City was, and had been for days, in a positive ferment of religious excitement; the bazaars were thronged with pilgrims who, by boat and train and on foot, had hurried to the city of a thousand temples.

Something unusual was in the air although no one could clearly explain what it was; something was to happen although no one could name the hour or the day!

Rice, and flowers, and jewels cemented with blood had been thrust into and pressed down until they completely filled the great crack which had suddenly appeared before the altar of the oldest and most venerated image of Kali, the Goddess of Destruction, in the Holy City; and the foreigner had been warned not to place his profane foot within the precincts of the city upon this night of the full moon.

The native laughed as he sprang to his feet, standing bare and exceeding beautiful beside the indescribable graven images; and he laughed as he searched in the folds of his turban, and having found the pellets bent down and pressed them between Leonie’s teeth, then jerked her to her feet, steadying her with his eyes.

He flung her back against the kiosk wall, and encircling her with his arms drove them fiercely down and against her as he met his splendid teeth in the whiteness of her shoulder—­in love; and taking her hand sped with her to the inner places of the city, shouting as he ran in the frenzy of his religion.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

  “Neither let her take thee with her eyelids.”—­The Bible. 
  “And making a tinkling with their feet.”—­The Bible.

The bazaars were moving in one solid mass in the direction of, but not to, the Cow Temple.

For hours the endless streams had moved inch by inch through the narrow streets lined with shops and gaily painted houses, towards the heart of India’s Holy City.

Young women and old, young men and old, children, fakirs and holy men pressed patiently forward, impelled and called by some mystic summons they could not explain.

There was no pushing nor striving, neither was there laughter nor any kind of merry-making, although a flower garland hung around every neck, although the multi-coloured raiment was of the best and cleanest and brightest, and the different marks of the different religious sects shone as though fresh painted between the eyes and upon the face and body.