The Believers’ Rally, as will be understood, was a gathering of some selectness.  If the Chinaman came, it was because of the vagueness of his reception of the privileges he claimed; and his ignorance of all tongues but his own left no medium for turning him out.  Qualms of conscience, however, kept all Miss Rozario’s young lady friends away, and these also, doubtless, operated to detain Duff Lindsay.  One does not attend a Believers’ Rally unless one’s personal faith extends beyond the lady in command of it, and one specially refrains if one’s spiritual condition is a delicate and debatable matter with her.  In Wellesley square, later in the evening, the conditions were different.  It would not be easy to imagine a scene that suggested greater liberality of sentiment.  The moon shed her light upon it, and the palms threw fretted shadows down.  Beyond them, on four sides, lines of street-lamps shone, and tram-drivers whistled bullock carts off the lines, and street pedlars lifted their cries.  A torch marked the core of the group of exhorters; it struck pale gold from Laura’s hair, and made glorious the buttons of the man who beat the drum.  She talked to the people in their own language; the “open air” was designed for the people.  “Kiko!  Kiko!” (Why!  Why!) Lindsay heard her cry, where he stood in the shadow, on the edge of the crowd.  He looked down at a coolie woman with shrivelled breasts crouched on her haunches upon the ground, bent with the bricks of half a century, and back at the girl beside the torch.  “Do not delay until to-morrow!” Laura besought them. “Kul-ka dari mut karo!” A sensation of disgust assailed him; he turned away.  Then, in an impulse of atonement—­he felt already so responsible for her—­he went back and dropped a coin into the coolie creature’s lap.  But he grew more miserable as he stood, and finally walked deliberately to a wooden bench at a distance, where he could not hear her voice.  Only the hymn pursued him; they sang presently a hymn.  In the chorus the words were distinguishable, borne in the robust accents of Captain Sand—­

    “Us ki ho tarif,
     Us ki ho tarif!”

The strange words, limping on the familiar air, made a barbarous jangle, a discordance of a special intolerable sort.

Lindsay wondered, with a poignancy of pity, whether the coolie woman were singing too, and found something like relief in the questionable reflection that if she wasn’t, in view of the rupee, she ought to be.

“Glory to His name!” “Glory to His name!”

His “Good evening!” when the meeting was over was a cheerful, general salutation, and the familiarity of the sight of him was plain in the response he got, equally general and equally cheerful.  Lieutenant Da Cruz’s smile was even further significant, if he had thought of interpreting it, and there was overt amiability in the manner in which Ensign Sand put her hymn-books together and packed everybody, including her husband, whose arm she took, out of the way.