and moving to the great future, already shining behind coming aeons, of the universal Kingdom.  Indeed, his humility was scientific; he made his deductions from the granular nature of all change, moral and material.  He never talked or thought of the Aryan souls that were to shine with peculiar oriental brightness as stars in the crown of his reward; he saw rather the ego and the energy of him merged in a wave of blessed tendency in this world, thankful if, in that which is to come, it was counted worthy to survive at all.  It should be understood that Arnold did not hope to attain the simplicity of this by means equally simple.  He held vastly, on the contrary, to fast days and flagellations, to the ministry of symbols, the use of rigours.  The spiritual consummation which the eye of faith enabled him to anticipate upon the horizon of Bengal should be hastened, however imperceptibly, by all that he could do to purify and intensify his infinitesimal share of the force that was to bring it about.  Meanwhile he made friends with the fathers of Bengali schoolboys, who appreciated his manners, and sent him with urbanity flat baskets of mangoes and nuts and oranges, pomegranates from Persia, and little round boxes of white grapes in sawdust from Kabul.  He seldom dwelt upon the converts that already testified to the success of the mission; it might be gathered that he had ideas about premature fruition.

As they stepped out together into the street, Lindsay thrust his hand within Arnold’s elbow.  It was an impulse, and the analysis of it would show elements like self-reproach, and a sense of value continually renewed, and a vain desire for an absolutely common ground.  The physical nearness, the touch, was something, and each felt it in the remoteness of his other world with satisfaction.  There was absurdly little in what they had to say to each other; they talked of the Viceroy’s attack of measles and the sanitary improvements in the cloth-dealers’ quarter.  Their bond was hardly more than a mutual decency of nature, niceness of sentiment, clearness of eye.  Such as it was, it was strong enough to make both men wish it were stronger, a desire which was a vague impatience on Lindsay’s part with a concentration of hostility to Arnold’s soutane.  It made its universal way for them, however, this garment.  Where the crowd was thickest people jostled and pressed with one foot in the gutter for the convenience of the padre-sahib.  He, with his eyes cast down, took the tribute with humility; as meet, in a way that made Lindsay blaspheme inwardly at the persistence of ecclesiastical tradition.

Suddenly, as they passed, the irrelevant violence of tongues, the broken, half-comprehensible tumult, was smitten and divided by a wave of rhythmic sound.  It pushed aside the cries of the sweetmeat sellers, and mounted above the cracked bell that proclaimed the continual auction of Krist, Dass and Friend, dealers in the second-hand.  In its vivid familiarity it seemed to make straight for the two Englishmen, to surround and take possession of them, and they paused.  The source of it was plain—­an open door under a vast white signboard dingily lettered “The Salvation Army.”  It loomed through the smoke and the street lights like a discovery.