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 afternoon, upon which chance had revealed to him the secret of his birth, had changed him from boy to man, and by them the early promise of beauty had been splendidly fulfilled. His features, while retaining their distinctively Hindu character, were now more strongly marked. The nose was straighter, the chin more firm, but the thin lips conveyed a suggestion of sensuality, in spite of the rigid asceticism of their lines. His head, under its close covering of fine, black hair, was small and shapely, lending to him a delusive air of stature. His hands and feet, too, were small, bearing testimony, as did every part of him, to the high-caste blood that ran in his veins. He moved as move the wild things of the forest—every motion graceful, clean, and sure, eloquent of the immense reserve of force that freed it from all trace of effort.

Almost nude, bronze-tinted, statuesque, magnificently developed by the unremitting toil which, as yet, was making, not breaking, his manhood, he stood there in the transparent darkness of the moonlight as perfectly fashioned a young animal as ever humanity had bred. Nature herself had stamped him with the seal of the great ruling caste; yet no Brahman's wafer was on his forehead, his body was clothed in a single coarse garment, the palms of his hands were roughened by constant labour, and he himself, an unconsidered unit in a host of toilers, had been until that night a serf and a hewer of stone.