to-morrow, but not strong enough for another excursion. I am afraid you will have to take your idol back alone. He has done enough mischief."

Mrs Chicester believed in totems and mascots.

"The china was Dresden," she said. "And Margaret had not had a day's illness till her bogie was installed. Besides, I had the most atrocious luck at bridge last night."

sive beasts unhanged. You may think yourself lucky you did not see him at his filthy tricks. You wouldn't have enjoyed your dinner if you had. But I'll tell you all about it when we've fed."

Gerard was enlightened in the smoking-room afterwards. "These Aghoris," Semphill said, "think themselves the most spiritual sect among the Hindus. They eat human

While they were having tea a telegram was brought Hayden telling him to meet his colonel at a quarter past twelve the next morning at Chandigarh junction. He was going through to Simla. This meant that Gerard would not be back in Gerkal till five, even if the train were punctual. Still there was a moon, and Gerard had made up his mind to return the bogie to its ghastly company by night if not by day. Evidently the mist-ridden peak was its proper sphere. Henceforth His Obesity should emit his rays of malevolence on his own unclean disciples.

That night he learnt more of them. He dined at the club, and sat next a policeman named Semphill. Gerard described the scene at the shrine to him, and the beastly monstrosity that had waved its clammy paws in Margaret's face as she peered in. Only he did not mention Margaret.

"My dear fellow," Semphill said, "it might have been much worse. That was an Aghori you saw; I think I know the man. They are the most offen

is that they have overcome all fleshly weaknesses, and so are nearer to God. Nothing revolts them; they are not subject to ordinary diseases. This sort of thing goes down enormously with the common people. I think I know the one you saw. He used to sit at the cross-roads near Pinjor with his head tilted back and his mouth open showing no teeth, just as you describe. What were his eyes like?"

"Like the white of an egg, a bit soiled where the pupils ought to be. And they seemed to grin."

"That's the man. He didn't beg, and no one ever saw him eat. When people asked him what he lived on he said 'Babies.' It may, or may not, have been true-they are great boasters.

All we knew was that he sometimes disappeared at night. Have a whisky and soda?"

"Thanks, I will."

"Of course, if we catch them at it we can run them in. If they dig any one up, it comes under desecration of tombs. I have known them prosecuted under the Public Nuisance Act. The

"Thanks. I think I've heard enough. Let's go out and get some fresh air."

But neither fresh air nor strong drink could disinfect Gerard's dreams. He went to bed and saw a pageant of Aghoris.

The Simla train was three hours late. When it arrived Gerard's colonel had no good news for him. It turned out that the agitators had been at work in Ambala, and they had managed to rake in a weed or two in Strangway's Horse before one of the native officers came to hear of them. Among the disaffected was a Malik in Gerard's squadron, a shifty blackguard whom Gerard had always regarded with suspicion. "The damned fellow was bucking sedition in the lines," the Colonel said. Gerard was disgusted. The whole business galled him. He must go and work the fellows into hand again. Incidentally it might mean that he and Margaret would have to put off the Church and the milliner and their glacier camp.

It was four o'clock when he started for Gerkal. The fever

swam so that it was an effort to sit straight in the saddle. As he rode through the main street of Chandigarh he remembered that Margaret ought to have a pair of knee-caps for her pony, so he dismounted and took a short cut through narrow alleys towards the leather bazaar. Soon he found himself in a quiet backwater of the old city, among the houses of Brahmins and astrologers, of which one sees little more than blind walls with mystic symbols on them, and here and there a corbelled window obstinately barred, with a bare chink to look through, or an old gateway studded with brass nails within a porch decorated all over with carved figures of the Pantheon. There seemed to be no life within these mysterious secretive dwellings, but Gerard felt that there was a hidden side to them, and that the old régime nourished vital flame within and kept a degenerate order from the door. He threaded the intricate maze, steering himself, as he thought, by his bump of locality, though

8

He was in a narrow passage between two dead walls when he became aware that some one in urgent need was crying out to him. His head was dizzy with a sudden wave of heat after a turn of ague, and he was almost deaf with the singing of quinine in his ears, but he was certain that he heard his own name called. It was the merest shadow of a voice that he followed, like the echo of a cicada or the shrill pipe of Ariel. It led him to a great gateway opening into a courtyard. As he stumbled through the open wicket Ganesh leered at him from the lintel, and Hanuman in his most riotous mood seemed about to leap on him from the wall. He stood in the cloisters of the temple of Vishnu.

The door of the cell whence the voice issued stood ajar. Gerard pushed in, but he could see nothing in the dim light after the blinding glare outside. He tried to fling the door wide open to let in some sunshine, but it had closed behind him, and he heard the bolt slide into the catch. He kicked at it without effect, and began groping about the room for something to use as a lever. He grew giddier with stooping. Soon he became conscious that he was not alone. His hand touched something cold on a charpoy, that sent 8 chill through his veins. But that was not all: there was something else in the cell equally

still, though it was alive. Gerard felt that it inhaled and breathed corruption. He sank to the ground in the corner farthest from it. Nothing moved except the rats that ran across the floor and over the charpoy, snapping up the cockroaches that infested the place. The brittle wingcases exploded between their teeth. Gradually his eyes be

So

came accustomed to the faint light, and the other inmate of the cell took shape across the charpoy. It was the Aghori. Its white filmy eyes explored the darkness above Gerard's head. There was some maggot of desire behind them which it was Gerard's business to subdue, even if he had to crush it with rending of tissues, as the rats the cockroaches. he sat confronting the beast, while a nerve in his head beat time to a frivolous refrain that would come and lodge there, as if he were a musical box, in spite of his efforts to drive it out. Very slowly the Aghori rose and lifted the sheet from the charpoy and stooped over it. Gerard struck at it with his riding - whip; it squirmed towards him and captured his feet; he felt that it was biting through his riding-boots. The lashes fell on its naked back, and the sound of them was dear to his soul. The whimperings of the beast woke the savage in him. Then the rhythm of the whip got out of tune somehow with the nerve that throbbed in his brain, and he went to sleep.

How many hours he lay there unconscious he could not

tell, but when he awoke the door was open and the full moon flooded the cell.

Gerard found his horse in the serai. He started for Gerkal at a mad gallop, but arrived there in a dhoolie. The cholera ward received him. He watched the cramped muscles playing under his skin. Then he went to sleep again

and floated for untold æons through numberless compartments of space towards 8 white peak which never seemed to grow any nearer. He was afraid that the thing which held him away from it would snap. He dreaded this very much, because the Aghori sat on the summit waiting for His Obesity to die.

No weakness is so human as superstition. We laugh at it, and yield to it, probing for the soul in matter, searching for a pattern in the web we call chance, seeking a current in the rhythm of things into which we may float and glide. We look for a design in the movement of the atoms, and hope to derange the eternal system.

Gerard lay at the point of death. Margaret hastened through the chequered night on a wild errand. An impulse drove her from the house. She walked and ran eight miles by road, and four by forest paths and broken crags. It was a gusty night. The wind swept through the rocking pines with the moan of distant breakers; thunder invested the peak from north and south. Every now and then a sudden deluge broke upon the ridge, and her path became a running watercourse. With one hand she clasped the idol, with the other she explored the darkness. At first the white palings helped her. When they came to an end

she groped her way along the cliff face. Then the full moon arose and flooded the world with light. At one moment Margaret scaled a wall of darkness; at the next she stood in a brightly-illumined bower. The pines were flinging the raindrops from their jewelled tassels; every needle became a quivering point of light; their fluent shadows danced in eddies at her feet, like ripples on the surface of a stream. She saw the immense valleys unfold and the shadows of the clouds race across the hills. Far below the plain took on a velvet sheen. She was wrapped in the splendour of the night, but not comforted. The sublimity of earth and heaven, the brooding intentness of the night, dwarfed the significance of her cares. She might strive and pray, but the spirit that informed the darkness would not hear. The forest and the hills had witnessed agonies like hers, but the rhythm of their music was unchanged.

Margaret hurried on. The moon was soaring towards a

dense wedge of cloud; she must not miss the interval of light. Soon she had left the road, and was in the forest. The spectral trees encompassed her; the grey rocks loomed towards her like living forms. She met a prowling leopard, but she had no fear. Half an hour after midnight she stood by the cairn. The moon rode high over the forest, breasting the scudding clouds. The peak was illuminated. All round a thousand points of light outshone the glowworm's beacon. The wet grass glistened, the mica sparkled at her feet. The plains below shimmered with light vapours that rolled into the interstices of the hill like the waves of the sea.

His Obesity reigned again on the cairn. The five saints were united. For Margaret their moonlit countenances were invested with a strange pathos. They symbolised so much of hope and fear, timid questionings, idle propitiation and vain commerce with the unseen. Somehow she felt less aloof from the folk who had raised them. Her sense of sisterhood with earth and living creatures had deepened. She sank down on the stones beside the goblins and wept. For the first time large tears rolled down her cheeks, and she sobbed as if her heart would break. The idols stared placidly from the cairn.

Far away she saw the twinkling lights of Gerkal. One of them shone from the hospital where Gerard still struggled with the unknown. Or was he now part of the

spirit which rolls through every thing, swelling the orchestra of the pines and breathing in their fragrance. If that were the end of their two souls she could bear it. Were they not both children of the open air?

Her tears soothed her, her grief became less poignant; there was comfort in her exhaustion. Somehow she felt as if the inspiration which had impelled her to the cairn was stirred by some current of circumstance which was carrying Gerard through the ordeal. As she groped her way through the darkness in the face of the storm, and panted up the hill, she had felt that she was fighting the grim summons side by side with him. The woods aided her. And now that the moon rode high above the clouds, caressing the hills and swathing the world in peace, something whispered to her deep in her inmost being that Gerard would live. But she dared not admit the hope.

When Margaret reached Gerkal the East was suffused with the rose and pearl of dawn; the white moon faded in the West; the sun had not risen above the mountains.

She found herself in the cold half-dark verandah of the hospital, asking how Captain Hayden was. A nurse she met in the passage did not know. She led Margaret along a covered way to the cholera ward, and entered a room which held the great secret. sently she appeared another nurse. Margaret read victory in their faces. She heard one of them say,

Prewith