There had been a test. He had
seen a child, and two women. And yet it was with a pang he found that
Mrs. Forrester had not waited.
CHAPTER VIII
THE HOT NIGHT
Rudolph paced his long chamber like a wolf,--a wolf in summer, with too
thick a coat. In sweat of body and heat of mind, he crossed from window
to window, unable to halt.
A faintly sour smell of parched things, oppressing the night without
breath or motion, was like an interminable presence, irritating,
poisonous. The punkah, too, flapped incessant, and only made the lamp
gutter. Broad leaves outside shone in mockery of snow; and like snow the
stifled river lay in the moonlight, where the wet muzzles of buffaloes
glistened, floating like knots on sunken logs, or the snouts of
crocodiles. Birds fluttered, sleepless and wretched. Coolies, flung
asleep on the burnt grass, might have been corpses, but for the sound of
their troubled breathing.
"If I could believe," he groaned, sitting with hands thrust through his
hair. "If I believe in her--But I came too late."
The lamp was an added torment. He sprang up from it, wiped the drops off
his forehead, and paced again.
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