“Oh yes, we’ll pray for him,” Ensign Sand returned, as if that might have gone without saying, “but you—­”

“And give me that precious baby.  You must be completely worn out.  I should enjoy taking care of him; indeed I should.”

“It’s the first—­the very first—­time she ever took that draggin’ child out of my arms for an instant,” the Ensign remarked to her husband and next in command later in the evening, but she resigned the infant without protest at the time.  Laura carried him into her own room with something like gaiety, and there repeated to him more nursery rhymes, dating from secular Putney, than she would have believed she remembered.

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 perception 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 toil 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 specially intolerable sort.