“Arise quickly, and come with me; thou shalt no more remain under my roof. I have fed thee for three moons, now thou mayst go forth and feed thyselves. I will set thee on the road, and give thee food for two days and a little money; get thee to some town, and appeal to the charitable. Return here, and I will slay thee.” The children rose trembling; they had not much delay in dressing, but Gyannia smuggled the cat under her bit of blue cloth (once her mother’s), and without one word the wretched pair meekly followed their uncle across the enclosure, past the oil-press, the sleeping bullocks, out of the postern, and through the silent village, then away to the high-road. Their kinsman walked along behind them in the powdery-white dust, stick in hand, for nearly two miles. It was nigh dawn; already the yellow light glimmered in the east; he must return; so he halted abruptly, and gave the boy some chupattis rolled in plantain leaves, and a four-anna piece (five-pence), and then said, “There lieth thy road out into the world; get thee gone, and never let me behold thy face again,” and turning, he walked rapidly homewards. The soft tap of his stick gradually died away, and then the children were quite alone. They sat down, and began to whisper. It was not a dream; their uncle had come to them in the middle of the night, and brought them along the high-road in the dark, and given them food, and told them to begone, and never let him see them again. After their first feeling of astonishment had abated, they devoured a chupatti, sharing it with the cat; and then, as the dawn of light showed red along the horizon, they rose and went forward. “If they had to walk, best make the journey now,” thought the boy, who was wonderfully sensible for his years. “Brother, whither are we going?” asked Gyannia presently. “We have no one to go to but father,” he replied. “We will go to him--to the Jail Khana.” But he did not tell her, nor would she have understood, that the jail in which their father lay imprisoned was seventy miles away. Hand-in-hand the two outcasts went slowly along the shadeless white roads; several villagers on the way to their work met them, and halted and stared at the party--a ragged little boy and girl, with a bazaar cat running after them. CHAPTER IV.