When he was advanced to the dignity of a silver belt—­which, with a magic square engraved on silver and hung round his neck, made up the greater part of his clothing—­he staggered on a perilous journey down the garden to Pir Khan and proffered him all his jewels in exchange for one little ride on Holden’s horse, having seen his mother’s mother chaffering with pedlars in the verandah.  Pir Khan wept and set the untried feet on his own gray head in sign of fealty, and brought the bold adventurer to his mother’s arms, vowing that Tota would be a leader of men ere his beard was grown.

One hot evening, while he sat on the roof between his father and mother watching the never-ending warfare of the kites that the city boys flew, he demanded a kite of his own with Pir Khan to fly it, because he had a fear of dealing with anything larger than himself, and when Holden called him a ‘spark,’ he rose to his feet and answered slowly in defence of his new-found individuality, ’Hum’park nahin hai.  Hum admi hai [I am no spark, but a man].’

The protest made Holden choke and devote himself very seriously to a consideration of Tota’s future.  He need hardly have taken the trouble.  The delight of that life was too perfect to endure.  Therefore it was taken away as many things are taken away in India—­suddenly and without warning.  The little lord of the house, as Pir Khan called him, grew sorrowful and complained of pains who had never known the meaning of pain.  Ameera, wild with terror, watched him through the night, and in the dawning of the second day the life was shaken out of him by fever—­ the seasonal autumn fever.  It seemed altogether impossible that he could die, and neither Ameera nor Holden at first believed the evidence of the little body on the bedstead.  Then Ameera beat her head against the wall and would have flung herself down the well in the garden had Holden not restrained her by main force.

One mercy only was granted to Holden.  He rode to his office in broad daylight and found waiting him an unusually heavy mail that demanded concentrated attention and hard work.  He was not, however, alive to this kindness of the gods.

III

The first shock of a bullet is no more than a brisk pinch.  The wrecked body does not send in its protest to the soul till ten or fifteen seconds later.  Holden realised his pain slowly, exactly as he had realised his happiness, and with the same imperious necessity for hiding all trace of it.  In the beginning he only felt that there had been a loss, and that Ameera needed comforting, where she sat with her head on her knees shivering as Mian Mittu from the house-top called, Tota!  Tota!  Tota!  Later all his world and the daily life of it rose up to hurt him.  It was an outrage that any one of the children at the band-stand in the evening should be alive and clamorous, when his own child lay dead.  It was more than mere pain when one of them touched