by degrees that they observed the other objects in the room—­the big drum on the floor in the empty space where the exhorters stood, the dozen wooden benches and the possible score of people sitting on them, the dull kerosene lamps on the walls, lighting up the curtness of the texts.  There were half-a-dozen men of the Duke’s Own packed in a row like a formation, solid on their haunches; and three or four unshaven and loose-garmented, from crews in the Hooghly, who leaned well forward, their elbows on their knees, twirling battered straw hats, with a pathetic look of being for the instant off the defensive.  One was a Scandinavian, another a Greek, with earrings.  There was a ship’s cook, too, a full-blooded negro, very respectable with a plaid tie and a silk hat; and beside, two East Indian girls of different shades, tittering at the Duke’s Own in an agony of propriety; a Bengali boy, who spelled out the English on the cover of a hymn-book; and a very clean Chinaman, who greatly appreciated his privilege, since it included a seat, a lamp, and a noise, though his perception of it possibly went no further.  The other odds and ends were of the mixed country blood, like the girls, dingy, undecipherable.  They made a shadow for the rest, lying along the benches, shifting unnoticeably.

Three people, two of them women, sat in the open space at the end of the room where the smoky fog from outside thickened and hung visibly in mid-air, and there was the empty seat of the man who was talking.  Laura Filbert was one of the women.  She might have been flung upon her chair; her head drooped over the back, buried in the curve of one arm.  A tambourine hung loosely from the hand nearest her face; the other lay, palm outward in its abandonment, among the folds that covered her limbs.  The folds hung from her waist, and the short close bodice that she wore above them, like a Bengali woman, left visible the narrow gap of flesh which nobody notices when it is brown.  Her head covering had slipped and clung only to the knot of hair at the nape of her neck; she lacked, pathetically, the conscious hand to draw it forward.  She was unaware even of the gaze of the Duke’s Own, though it had fixity and absorption.

The man with folded hands went on talking.  He seemed to have caught as a text the refrain of the hymn that had been sung.  “Yes indeed,” he said, “I can tell every one ’ere this night, h’every one, that the Saviour is mighty to keep.  I’ve got it out of my own personal experience, I ’ave.  Jesus don’t only look after you on a Sunday but six days a week, my friends, six days a week.  Fix your eye on Him and He’ll keep His eye on you—­that’s all your part of it.  I don’t mean to say I don’t stumble an’ fall into sin.  There’s times when the Devil will get the upper ’and, but oh, my friends, I ask you each an’ every one of you, is that the fault of Jesus?  No, it is not ’is fault, it is the fault of the person.  The person ’as been forgetting