Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/367

Rh favour he suffered me to drink tea in his presence. Suffer me not to drink tea, for I am thirsty.'

With a laugh above his tears, Kim kissed the lama's feet, and went about tea-making.

'Thou leanest on me in the body, Holy One, but I lean on thee for all other things. Dost thou know it?'

'I have guessed maybe,' and the lama's eyes twinkled. 'We must change that.'

So, when with scufflings and scrapings and a hot air of importance, paddled up nothing less than the Sahiba's pet palanquin sent twenty miles, with that same grizzled old Oorya servant in charge, and when they reached the disorderly order of the long white rambling house behind Saharunpore, the lama took his own measures.

Said the Sahiba cheerily from an upper window, after compliments: 'What is the good of an old woman's advice to an old man? I told thee—I told thee, Holy One, to keep an eye upon the chela. How didst thou do it? Never answer me! I know. He has been running among the women. Look at his eyes—hollow and sunk! And the Betraying Line from the nose down. He has been sifted out! Fie! Fie! And a priest, too!'

Kim looked up almost too weary to smile, shaking his head in denial.

'Do not jest,' said the lama. 'That time is done. We are here upon great matters. A sickness of soul took me in the hills, and him a sickness of the body. Since then I have lived upon his strength—eating him.'

'Children together—young and old,' she sniffed, but forebore to make any new jokes. 'May this present hospitality restore ye. Hold a while and I will come to gossip of the high good hills.'

At evening time—her son-in-law was returned, so she did not