I

the Curator’s table. “That is for a memory between thee and me⁠—my pencase. It is something old⁠—even as I am.”

It was a piece of ancient design, Chinese, of an iron that is not smelted these days; and the collector’s heart in the Curator’s bosom had gone out to it from the first. For no persuasion would the lama resume his gift.

“When I return, having found the River, I will bring thee a written picture of the Padma Samthora such as I used to make on silk at the lamassery. Yes⁠—and of the Wheel of Life,” he chuckled, “for we be craftsmen together, thou and I.”

The Curator would have detained him: they are few in the world who still have the secret of the conventional brush-pen Buddhist pictures which are, as it were, half written and half drawn. But the lama strode out, head high in air, and pausing an instant before the great statue of a Bodhisat in meditation, brushed through the turnstiles.

Kim followed like a shadow. What he had overheard excited him wildly. This man was entirely new to all his experience, and he meant to investigate further, precisely as he would have investigated a new building or a strange festival in Lahore city. The lama was his trove, and he purposed to take possession. Kim’s mother had been Irish, too.

The old man halted by Zam-Zammah and looked round till his eye fell on Kim. The inspiration of his pilgrimage had left him for awhile, and he felt old, forlorn, and very empty.

“Do not sit under that gun,” said the policeman loftily.

“Huh! Owl!” was Kim’s retort on the lama’s behalf. “Sit under that gun if it please thee. When didst thou steal the milkwoman’s slippers, Dunnoo?”

That was an utterly unfounded charge sprung on the spur of the moment, but it silenced Dunnoo, who knew that Kim’s clear yell could